Praise for New York Times bestselling author MICHELLE SAGARA and The Chronicles of Elantra series

“No one provides an emotional payoff like Michelle Sagara. Combine that with a fast-paced police procedural, deadly magics, five very different races and a wickedly dry sense of humor—well, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

—Bestselling author Tanya Huff on The Chronicles of Elantra series

“Intense, fast-paced, intriguing, compelling and hard to put down…unforgettable.”

—In the Library Reviews on Cast in Shadow

“Readers will embrace this compelling, strong-willed heroine with her often sarcastic voice.”

—Publishers Weekly on Cast in Courtlight

“The impressively detailed setting and the book’s spirited heroine are sure to charm romance readers as well as fantasy fans who like some mystery with their magic.”

—Publishers Weekly on Cast in Secret

“Along with the exquisitely detailed world building, Sagara’s character development is mesmerizing. She expertly breathes life into a stubborn yet evolving heroine. A true master of her craft!”

—RT Book Reviews (4 ½ stars) on Cast in Fury

“With prose that is elegantly descriptive, Sagara answers some longstanding questions and adds another layer of mystery. Each visit to this amazing world, with its richness of place and character, is one to relish.”

—RT Book Reviews (4 ½ stars) on Cast in Silence

“Another satisfying addition to an already vivid and entertaining fantasy series.”

—Publishers Weekly on Cast in Chaos

Cast in Ruin
Michelle Sagara

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I’d like to dedicate this book to the Harlequin/LUNA team.

Editorial—

Mary-Theresa Hussey, Elizabeth Mazer, Margo Lipschultz and Tara Parsons;

Art—

Kathleen Oudit, Vanessa Karabegovic and Shane Rebenschied;

Marketing—

Marianna Ricciuto, Ashley Reid and Diana Wong;

and the Harlequin Sales Group

as well as all the others who touch the book behind the scenes.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

The worst thing about near-world-ending disasters according to Sergeant Marcus Kassan—at least the ones that had miraculously done very little damage—was the paperwork they generated. Two departments over, the Hawks required to man desks visible—and accessible—to the public would probably have disagreed. Vehemently. In Leontine.

In the day and a half since four very large Dragons, a small army, and every Sword on the roster had converged on Elani street, there’d been a steady stream of people coming to the office that bordered Missing Persons to make complaints, demand redress, or simply ask for some assurance that the world had not, in fact, ended. The numbers of civilian complaints had, in theory, peaked.

Theory, as usual, was invented by some bureaucrat in a high tower who didn’t have to actually deal with said complaints. Private Neya, however, wasn’t even Corporal, let alone lofty bureaucrat. She was part of the emergency shift of Hawks who’d been crammed into a workspace—already tight to begin with—in order to deal with the civilians. The Hawks who regularly manned these desks were generally older and certainly better suited to the task.

They appeared to appreciate the help about as much as the help appreciated being there.

“You’re beat Hawks,” her Sergeant had growled. For some of the officers who worked in the Halls of Law, growl would be figurative. In the case of Kaylin Neya, it was literal: her Sergeant was a Leontine. “You deal with the public every day.”

“Right. We deal with the public accused of stealing, mugging, and murder.” All in all, it didn’t give the brightest window into the human condition. When Sergeant Kassan failed to even blink, she added, “You know them—they’re the people I don’t have to worry about offending?”

Marcus, however, had failed to be moved. Kaylin had not, which is why she currently occupied half a stranger’s desk.

“You were assigned to Elani,” he pointed out. “At the moment, Elani is still—”

“Under quarantine. Yes. I realize that.”

“Since you can’t do your job there for the next few days, you can make yourself useful in the front rooms, since we are still paying you.”

Not surprisingly, many of the reports delivered by timid, angry, or deranged civilians involved descriptions of a giant Dragon roaming the streets. His color varied from report to report, as did his activities; he reportedly breathed fire, ate people—or at least large, stray dogs—and leveled buildings. He was alternately the usual Dragon size—which, to be fair, was not small—or giant; he was also deafening.

This last part was accurate. The rest, not so much. Kaylin, of course, knew the Dragon being described. Dragons were forbidden, by law, from assuming their native forms within the City of Elantra without express permission from the Eternal Emperor. Lord Tiamaris, however, had received that dispensation. He was, the last time she’d seen him, a shade that approached copper. He did have an impressive wingspan, but none of the eyewitnesses had claimed to see him fly.

Most of the witnesses, however, claimed that Tiamaris led a small army. The descriptions of this army varied almost as widely as descriptions of Tiamaris himself. The word Barbarian came up almost as often as Savage, but both ran a distant second and third to Giant. She particularly liked the two people—who had come in together and were shoving each other in between sentences—who claimed that they were an army of the shambling undead. Their size was, according to these civilian reports, all over the map; their numbers ranged from “lots” to “fifty thousand.” Most accounts agreed, however, that the strangers were armed.

This last had the benefit of being accurate. The strangers—or refugees—themselves were, as far as anyone knew, newcomers to the world—the idea that this was a world, rather than the only world being almost as new to most of the authorities as the refugees themselves. According to the Palace, and more important, to Lord Sanabalis, the refugees numbered roughly three thousand strong. As their destination was the fief of Tiamaris, no formal census had been taken or even considered. They wouldn’t technically be citizens of Elantra.

They weren’t giants, a race that Kaylin privately thought entirely in the realm of children’s stories, but they were about eight feet in height at the upper end; the children were taller than Kaylin. They didn’t speak Elantran, which was Kaylin’s mother tongue; they didn’t speak Barrani, either, Barrani being the language in which the laws were written. But the Imperial linguists, with the aid of Ybelline Rabon’alani, had gone with Tiamaris. They’d been the only people who’d looked truly excited at the prospect of three thousand armed, hungry, and exhausted eight-foot-tall strangers. They were also, however, absent from the civilian reports, and therefore not her problem.

Kaylin had received some training in speaking with civilians, because some of her job did involve talking to possible witnesses in a way that didn’t terrify them so much they denied seeing anything; putting it to use in the crowded office full of strangers was almost more than she could stomach. She did not, however, point out that they were blind or out of their minds; she transcribed most of what they said with unfailing attention.

This was, in part, because in the end Marcus would have to read most of these, or at least sign them. He loathed paperwork.

On the bright side? The unusual births, the rains of blood—and, in one area, frogs—and the unfortunate and inexplicable change in the City’s geography, had ceased. Elani, however, now had a stream running along one side of the street, and the blood-red flowers that had popped up in the wake of the refugees were proving more hardy than tangleknot grass.

It would probably only be a matter of time before some enterprising fraud picked them, bottled them, and sold them as an elixir of youth; it was Elani street, after all.

Kaylin glanced at the small mirror at the end of the overwhelmed desk she was half behind. The Records of the Halls of Law, forbidden to the rank and file during the state of emergency, were now once again deemed safe to use, which meant the mirror added more external chatter to a loud and bustling office.

Kaylin tried to avoid listening to it; it only annoyed her. The Barrani Hawks were, of course, excused external desk duty. Something about tall, slender immortals put normal civilians off their stride; for some reason they felt the Barrani were arrogant and condescending. This was probably, in Kaylin’s opinion, because they had working eyes and ears. The Aerian Hawks were excused the “emergency” shift work because the small size—and low ceilings—of the cramped room made having large wings a disadvantage. In theory.

Luckily, the force contained enough humans that the extra shifts decreed as necessary by some higher-up could be filled. If Kaylin knew who he—or she—was, there’d be a new picture on the dartboard in the office by the end of the week. Who knew a hand could cramp so damn badly when the only activity of the day was writing and trying to hide the fists that incredible stupidity normally caused?

Severn Handred, her Corporal partner, had fared better, in large part because he didn’t mind the stupidity. He met her when she managed to edge her way out of the single door that led—from the inside of the Halls of Law—to the office itself. There was a door on the opposite wall, as well, but as it led into the people who were waiting to make their incredibly frustrating reports, Kaylin avoided that one.

“Well?” he asked. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” she replied.

“That bad?”

“I think it was the conspiracy of evil chickens that did me in.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me. I honestly have no idea how more of the Hawks in that damn office aren’t arraigned on assault charges.”

“Bridget keeps them in line.”

“Bridget?”

“Sergeant Keele.”

Kaylin cringed. “I could see that.” Sergeant Keele was one of the staff regulars; this was her domain. She’d been entirely undelighted at the additional staff thrust upon her, in part because she felt it impugned her ability to handle the situation. She had, however, been brisk, if chilly, and she didn’t mince words—or orders. If hazing was part of the unofficial schedule of the regular office workers, it wasn’t something she had time for, so it had to be damn subtle.

“Can you top evil chickens?” she asked hopefully.

He thought about it for a minute. “Probably not.”

“Dinner?”

He nodded slowly. “You didn’t happen to check the mirror before you left?”

“I shut it off. Why?”

“Sergeant Kassan is expecting us.”

“What? Why?”

“The important question is actually, ‘When?’.”

She swore.

Caitlin was still at her desk, but many of the regulars had already vacated theirs and headed home, something Kaylin had every hope of doing soon. The office den mother looked up as Kaylin entered. “Bad day, dear?” she asked.

Kaylin shrugged. “It could have been worse.”

“Oh?”

“I could have been the one who had to listen to Mrs. Erickson.”

Caitlin, used to seeing some of the paperwork that crossed between offices, grimaced. Mrs. Erickson was famous—or infamous—for the messages she carried; they were invariably from the dead. The nosy, busybody dead. They ranged in importance from left shoes—Kaylin had refused to believe this until the report was pulled and shoved under her nose—to Empire-spanning conspiracies against the Dragon Emperor. Since Mrs. Erickson liked to bake, all her messages were conveyed alongside cookies or small cakes, none of which had ever caused even the slightest bit of indigestion.

“What was today’s message?”

“I missed it—I was too busy dealing with the reports about the invading army and its Dragon. Whatever her dead messenger was concerned about, though, it was long. How were things here?”

“Well, Margot is threatening to join the Merchants’ Guild and file a formal guild complaint if we don’t lift the quarantine on Elani street soon. She’s also seeking financial redress for economic losses taken because of the involuntary closure of her store.”

Kaylin snorted. “Let her. I can’t quite decide who’d be the loser in that transaction—Margot or the guild.” Kaylin despised both with a frequently expressed and very colorful passion.

“I don’t believe Lord Grammayre is looking for more official difficulty at the moment.”

At that, Kaylin’s expression flattened. “You’ve had word?”

“Not official word, no. But the investigation into the Exchequer is not going well. The Human Caste Court has closed ranks around him. The Emperor has not closed the investigation, but by all reports he is…not pleased.” She paused, and then added, “Word was, however, sent from the Palace. For you.”

Kaylin winced. “It’s only been two days,” she murmured.

“Two days, for Lord Diarmat, is long enough.” Marcus’s voice growled from behind her.

Marcus was at his desk, surrounded by the usual teetering piles of paper; Kaylin counted three. The gouges in the surface of said desk didn’t appear to be deeper or more numerous, which probably meant his mood hadn’t descended to foul, yet.

“You’re late,” he growled. Since his irises were a distinct gold, Kaylin said, “Not according to Sergeant Keele, sir.” She walked over to his desk and took up position in front of it; Severn lingered behind.

Without preamble, he handed her a set of curved papers. She took them as if they were live cockroaches and began to read. The top letter—and it was a letter—was from Lord Sanabalis of the Dragon Court.

Sanabalis had extended the period of grace in which she was allowed to skip the magic class he was responsible for making certain she attended; the transitioning of three thousand refugees who required housing and food were of primary import for the next week. Or two. He wished her luck during the extra work that this type of emergency generated, by which she inferred he knew of her day’s work in the outer office.

The second letter was from Diarmat, and it was not, by any reasonable definition, a letter; it was a set of orders. She read it once, and then glanced up over the top edge of the page to see Leontine eyes watching her carefully.

“He is,” Marcus said drily, “the Commander of the Imperial Guard, a force that is almost entirely composed of humans.”

“Have you had to interact with them?”

“On several occasions. I’ve survived.”

“Have they?”

He raised a brow; his eyes, however, stayed the same mellow gold. She had a sneaking suspicion he was enjoying this.

Lord Diarmat—whose classes were to be conducted after-bloody-hours on her own time—considered three thousand refugees and a significant area of the city under quarantine unworthy of mention. She swore. Caitlin coughed.

“He reminds me that the first of our lessons starts tonight.”

“Then you’d best have something to eat, dear,” Caitlin told her. “I highly doubt that Lord Diarmat will be casual enough to offer to feed you.”

Feed her? If she was lucky, he’d be civil enough not to eat her himself.

She looked at the window. “Time?” she asked it.

“Five hours and a half,” the window replied. “Please check the duty roster on your way out.”

Because she was feeling masochistic, she did. She was penciled in for yet another day on outsiders’ desk duty.

Severn kept her company as she trudged down the street toward the baker’s. He also handed her the coins she needed to pay Manners Forall, who happened to be manning his own stall. He smiled and said, “We don’t usually see you this late in the month.” It was true. This late in the month she was usually scrounging for less expensive food.

Severn said nothing, but he said it loudly, reminding her in silence of the budgeting discussion they’d failed to find the time for. It was the only silver lining on the thundercloud of Lord Diarmat and his so-called etiquette lessons. Severn didn’t remain silent, however, and they wrangled over times for yet a different lesson in Kaylin’s educational schedule while they made their way to the Palace.

The streets weren’t noticeably less crowded than they had been; apparently the crazed fear of Dragons and their itinerant armies didn’t stop most people from going about their daily business. Severn left her at the Palace gates, pausing only to check her wrist. There, the bracer that she wore by Imperial Decree caught the lights above. It was heavy enough to be the gold that it looked, and it was studded with what appeared to be three large gems: a diamond, a ruby, and a sapphire.

“I haven’t taken it off since we got back from Evanton’s,” she told him. But she didn’t resent his checking, much. Diarmat wasn’t known for his flexibility. “I’ll see you in the morning. If I’m still alive.” Severn was also penciled in for crazy duty; he minded it less ferociously.

The very forbidding and starched man whose title she couldn’t recall met her at the doors; he stood well inside them, and somewhat behind the Imperial Guards who gave her a quick once-over. It was cursory, however; the man stepped forward and said in his clipped High Barrani, “Lord Diarmat is expecting you, Private Neya. If you will follow me.”

She did. She could now reliably make her way to the chambers in which Sanabalis frequently conducted his meetings, and she could—if she were feeling foolishly brave—find the Library unescorted. She had no idea what Diarmat called home—or office—in the Palace, and had she not been certain of finding him in it, she would have been genuinely curious.

But during the handful of times she’d met him, he’d failed to be anything remotely resembling friendly, and tolerant was a word that she suspected he’d failed to learn, although his High Barrani was otherwise flawless. Severn had said that his Elantran was also flawless—and completely free from colloquialisms. Kaylin had already decided it was best to stick with High Barrani; it was a lot harder to make verbal gaffes in that language.

The starched man paused in front of a set of double doors that looked suspiciously unlike any classroom doors she’d ever entered. There were no guards at the doors, which was good. The doors were warded, which was bad. Not only were they warded, but there appeared to be two damn wards, one on each door. She glanced at her guide and said without much hope, “I don’t suppose those are just decorative?”

“No, they are not. You are required to touch both wards; you are not, however, required to touch them at the same time, should you find yourself, for reasons of injury, unable to do so.”

Kaylin’s natural aversion to magic was not quite as strong as her aversion to having her head bitten off by an angry Dragon Lord, but it was close. She stepped up to the doors, stood in arm’s reach, and grimaced; the wards were higher than shoulder height. She guessed they’d been designed for the regular variety of Imperial Palace Guard; they had, among other things, fairly strict height requirements.

Grimacing, she placed her left palm on the left-door ward, and felt the strong bite of magic travel up her arm so forcefully her arm went numb. The ward, however, began to glow; it wasn’t a comforting sight, given that the light was a sickly, pulsing green. Any hope that her guide had been wrong vanished; the door didn’t budge. Aware of his presence, she kept her teeth shut firmly over the Leontine words that were trying to leap out, and lifted her hand again.

It was her left hand. She was right-handed, and with her luck, the first thing Diarmat would do was ask her to write some long Barranian test; she couldn’t afford to have a numb, useless writing hand. It was awkward, but she lifted her left arm again—without cursing—and placed her palm more or less in the center of its damn ward.

The door ward began to glow a livid, pale purple. It hurt to touch, and given her arm was half-numb, this said something. Unfortunately, the door wards also said something—and from the sounds of the echo, it was in Dragon. She did curse, but then Leontine spoken with a human throat couldn’t possibly be audible over the racket the ward had caused.

To make matters worse—as if the universe needed to remind her that they could be—the hall, which was long and high ceilinged, began to fill with Imperial Palace Guards. Her starched guide didn’t blink or move as she turned to face them. Give them this: they were impressive. They wore heavier armor than patrolling Hawks, they carried large swords, and they moved in frightening unison, as if this were some arcane drill and they’d be demoted if one foot was out of place.

She doubted she’d appreciate it more if their weapons had not, in fact, been pointing toward her. She didn’t bother drawing her own; all she had at the moment were daggers, and one numb hand. Instead, she lifted her hands—slowly—and stood very still. The doors at her back rolled open.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” a familiar voice said. “That will be all.”

He received one very noisy salute—gauntlets did that in an otherwise silent hall—as she turned to face him. She could hear the guards form up and retreat, but didn’t bother to watch them leave. Instead, she faced Lord Diarmat of the Dragon Court.

He was slightly taller than Tiamaris, and he had the broad—and, sadly, muscular—build of Dragons in human form; he also had Dragon eyes. His lower membranes muted their color, but in this light, they were gold, although the gold seemed tinted with orange. Then again, gold was a happy color, and she doubted that someone with an expression that consistently severe could be happy. He was not, however, dressed in natural Dragon armor; he wore robes with a distinct Imperial Crest blazoned across the chest.

“Lord Diarmat,” she said, tendering as formal a bow as she could.

“I see that reports of your tardiness are exaggerated.” He glanced at the doors. “And reports of your effect on some of the more formal wards are not.”

She managed to say nothing.

“Nor, it appears, are reports about the need for some formal structure in your interactions with the Imperial Court.” He looked past her to the man who had led her here. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Please send someone in two hours to escort Private Neya out; she is not, I believe, familiar with the Palace.”

The man nodded briskly. “Lord Diarmat,” he said, and then turned and walked off.

Diarmat now gestured toward the room behind the offending doors. “Please,” he said. “Enter.”

The room was, as the doors suggested, large. The ceilings were at least as high as the ones that characterized the public halls, and the walls were thirty feet away from the open doors on all sides. The whole of the office Kaylin generally called home would have comfortably fit in the space, although some of the furniture would have to be moved to accommodate it. There were two desks in the far corner, and an arrangement of chairs around one central table of medium height; there was a long table that seemed like a dining table, although no similar chairs were tucked beneath it.

Windows opened into a courtyard that had no view of the Halls of Law—and no view of the streets of the City, either; instead, there were stones that were arranged at various heights and distances, as if it were meant to be a garden. She saw doors leading out of the room to either side. This was as far from a typical classroom as a room could get. She glanced at Diarmat, waiting for his instructions.

He didn’t bother with them. Instead, he crossed the room and headed toward his desk. It was unblemished, and no mounds of paperwork teetered precariously anywhere in sight; there was an inkstand, and three small bars of wax. Even paper was absent. He took the chair behind the desk, and then frowned at the doors behind Kaylin.

“Should I close them?”

He spoke a single curt word and the doors began to roll shut on their own, which was all of his reply. He then stared at her, unblinking, until she made her way to the front of the desk.

He took parchment out of a desk drawer, placed it—dead center—on its surface, and uncapped his ink. “You have been a student of Lord Sanabalis for some months now.”

“Yes.”

“You have, however, shown little progress in the classes he teaches.”

It was a bit of a sore point, because little progress, to Kaylin’s mind, meant waste of time. On the other hand, at least she was paid to attend Sanabalis’s mandatory classes.

“Lord Sanabalis, under the auspices of the Imperial Order of Mages, has developed a level of tolerance for the lazy and the inexact that is almost unheard of among our kind. Mages are not generally considered either stable or biddable; were it not for the necessity of some of their services, and the existence of the Arcanum as a distinctly less welcome alternative, they would not be tolerated at all.” His tone made clear that were it up to him, neither the Imperial Order nor the Arcanum would be long for this world.

Which was a pity, because Kaylin agreed with him, and this might be the only point on which there would be any common ground. Defending either organization was not, however, her job.

“I am not Lord Sanabalis. What he tolerates, I will not tolerate. I have perused some of your previous academic records, but not in any depth; I no longer consider them relevant. You were not raised in an environment with strong Barrani influences, and you will therefore have little understanding of the way in which those influences govern some parts of the Palace.

“They are not, however, your chief concern. I am told that you have a strong grasp of High Barrani. When the Court is in session, the language of choice defaults to High Barrani in the presence of races that are not Dragon. Were you not required to interact with the Emperor, neither you, nor I, would be required to waste time in this endeavor.” His tone made clear whose time he thought more valuable. “You will, however, be required to speak.

“Speech, were it the only requirement, you might be able to manage. Because you are considered worthy of such a privilege, however, correct form and behavior will be assumed. Any deviation from those forms will be seen as a breach, not of etiquette, but of respect. Disrespect of the Emperor is ill advised.”

She nodded. This didn’t make his expression any friendlier, and it didn’t make her any happier; she bit back any words to that effect, and instead said, “What did I do wrong when you appeared at the doors?” She spoke as smoothly and neutrally as possible, but she couldn’t quite stop her cheeks from reddening.

He raised a Dragon brow. “That,” he told her, “is an almost perceptive question.”

Not perceptive enough to answer? She waited. The problem with immortals was that, short of immediate emergencies, they had forever; what seemed a long time to a normal person was insignificant to them. Their arrogance seemed to stem from the fact that they’d seen and experienced so much more than a mortal could achieve in an entire lifetime, it negated mortal experience.

Kaylin didn’t like being treated like a child in the best of circumstances—no one did—but Immortals always felt they were dealing with children when mortals were involved. Some were just way better at hiding it. Diarmat clearly couldn’t be bothered. She waited, and he returned to the paper beneath his hands and began to write. She could actually read upside-down writing; it was one of the things she’d figured out when boredom had taken hold in her early classes and she was trying to be less obvious about it. But in this case, she had a suspicion he’d notice, and it seemed career limiting.

She was also no longer a bored student; she was here as a Hawk, not a mascot. She left her hands loosely by her sides, and stared at a point just past his left shoulder while she waited for some instruction—to sit, to stand, to go away, to answer questions. Anything.

What felt like half an hour later she was still standing in front of his damn desk, and he was still writing. He had told her nothing at all about the rules that governed the Imperial Court or its meetings. He hadn’t spoken of any particular style of dress, hadn’t given her any information about forms of address, hadn’t demonstrated any of the salutes or bows with which one might open speech. Since she’d managed to eat something on the hurried walk over, her stomach didn’t embarrass her by speaking when she wouldn’t.

At the end of the page, he looked up. Folding the paper in three he reached for wax, and this, he melted by the simple expedient of breathing on it slightly. He then pressed a small seal into what had fallen on the seam. He reached across the desk and handed her the letter. “This,” he said, “is for the perusal of Lord Grammayre on the morrow.” He rose, and made his way out from behind his bastion of a desk; there, he exhaled. It was loud.

“Very well,” he said, as if he was vaguely disappointed. “You have some ability to display patience. Your posture is not deplorable. Your ability to comport yourself does not directly affect the respect in which the Halls of Law are now held.” He spoke in crisp, perfectly enunciated High Barrani. He now opened a drawer, and a thick sheaf of papers appeared on the desk.

These, Kaylin thought, would be the various educational reports he had barely, in his own words, perused.

He handed them to her; she slid the letter to the Hawklord into her tunic, and took the offending pile, glancing briefly at what lay on top of it. Transcripts, yes. To her surprise, the first one was not a classroom diatribe from a frustrated or angry teacher.

“This is a case report,” she said before she could stop herself.

“It is.” He walked around to her side. “Do you recognize it?”

She nodded.

“You were working in concert with two Barrani Hawks.”

“Teela and Tain,” she said. She didn’t flip through the report; she knew which case this was. All boredom or irritation fled, then.

“It was, I believe, the breaking of a child-prostitution ring.”

“It was.”

“Do you recall the chain of events that led to the deaths of some of the men involved?”

She nodded again, although it was almost untrue: she didn’t remember the end clearly at all. She remembered her utter, unstoppable rage. And she remembered the deaths that rage—and her unbridled magic—had caused.

His silence could have meant many things, but since his face was as expressive as cold stone, she didn’t bother to look at him.

“I would like you to peruse the rest of the documents,” he finally said.

She did. It wasn’t a small pile—although it wasn’t Leontine in proportion—but there really weren’t that many cases in which she’d lost control of her inexplicable magic to such devastating effect; she had literally skinned a man alive. She didn’t regret it. Not in any real way. He would have died anyway, after his trial. But…the trial had been moot, and Marcus had not been happy.

The next report made her right hand tighten into a white-knuckled fist before she got halfway down the first page. It wasn’t a case report. It wasn’t a report that the Halls of Law would ever generate.

It was, instead, a report on the Guild of Midwives. She almost dropped the report on the desk. Instead, she forced her hand to relax—as much as it could—while she read. It detailed all the emergency call-ins she’d done—and it detailed, in some cases, the results. She lifted the top page. Her memory wasn’t the best, but she thought, looking briefly at dates and commentary, none in a hand she recognized, that it was more complete than anything she could have written for him, had he asked.

Grim, she flipped through the pile, and was unsurprised to see that he also had a similar report for each visit she’d made to Evanton’s shop on Elani street. This angered her less; she knew the Dragon Court spied on Evanton.

There was a brief report of her visits to the High Halls, again not much to fuss about; there was a report on every visit she had made in recent months to the fiefs—any fief crossing. There was a report that followed her movements to, and from, both the Leontine Quarter and the Tha’alani Quarter. Diarmat was silent as she read, as if waiting for a reaction she didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing.

But the final report was of the Foundling Hall.

CHAPTER 2

It took all the self-control Kaylin had ever mastered not to crumple the document into a ball and throw it. She couldn’t even read it, although her eyes grazed the words, recognizing dates and familiar names.

“So,” Diarmat said in his cool, clipped voice. She forced herself to meet his gaze—or she tried. He wasn’t looking at her face; he was staring, inner membranes fully extended, at her wrist. She glanced at it. The gems on the bracer she wore were flashing brightly enough that they could be clearly seen through layers of clothing.

The lights cut through her anger as if they were a cold, cold dagger.

Get a grip, she told herself. It’s a piece of paper. It’s just another damn piece of paper. It’s not like all the rest of the reports didn’t make clear that the Court had followed every damn move she’d made for years; why would she expect they’d somehow miss her visits to the Foundling Hall? She took a slow, deep breath—the type of breath she’d learned to take when she’d been injured and she was in pain.

The lights on the bracer began to dim, but they dimmed slowly.

Only when they were no longer visible did she turn to face Diarmat, the reports shaking in her tightened hands. Without a single word, she handed them back to him. He waited for a minute before nodding and retrieving them. “That will be all.”

She turned and made her way toward the doors, but stopped before she touched them and turned back. “They’re my hoard,” she told him quietly. She didn’t have to shout; Dragons, like Leontines, had a very acute sense of hearing.

His eyes were a pale shade of copper. “You are mortal,” he replied with no hesitation whatsoever. “Mortals neither have, nor understand, the concept. The word hoarding,” he added with genuine distaste, “is possibly as close as your inferior race can come.”

She turned instantly on her heel and pushed the doors open; words were burning the insides of her mouth, and she couldn’t let them out in his earshot. But when the doors were halfway open, he said, “Private.” Human hearing was inferior, and he hadn’t raised his voice; he wasn’t speaking his native tongue. She pretended not to hear him, and escaped into the hall.

She was halfway down that hall—her guide having failed to materialize—when she ran into Sanabalis. Sadly, head down, body tilted in that particular forward angle that was a fast walk threatening to break into an all-out run, it was literal. She bounced; he didn’t budge. A half-formed apology slid out of her mouth as she righted herself and looked up.

“I see your first class ended early.”

She nodded.

“Join me.” It wasn’t worded as a request, and he didn’t actually wait to see if she was going to treat it as one; he turned and began to walk down the hall. Since this implied that he knew where he was going—and since she didn’t—she fell in behind him. He led her from the unfamiliar halls to ones she’d walked through often enough that she could find her bearings.

He walked, not surprisingly, to his rooms, opening the door and holding it while she entered—as if he half suspected she’d turn and bolt for the exit if he wasn’t watching. Since it happened to be true, she didn’t begrudge him the suspicion. There was no food in the room, but the comforting set of impressive windows still looked out at the three towers of the Halls of Law, and even though it was now evening, they could be seen clearly in the moon’s light, reminding her, at a remove, of why she was here at all.

She drew a deep breath, and the line of her shoulders sagged when she exhaled. But she faced the towers, not the Dragon Lord, as they did.

“The lesson?” Sanabalis asked quietly.

She shrugged. It was stiff, and she felt her shoulders bunching up around her neck again. “I survived.”

“Did you walk out?”

“No. I was dismissed.”

She heard Sanabalis exhale. “Lord Diarmat does not generally teach—when he is given to do so—in his personal quarters.”

“No? Does he do it in an abattoir instead?”

She felt the brief heat of his snort, and turned. “The Palace Guard has several open yards, and a handful of enclosed rooms, for the purpose of training.”

“He’s not training me to be an Imperial Guard.”

“No.”

“What, exactly, is my relationship to Lord Diarmat in the Hierarchy, anyway?”

“What is your relationship to the Human Castelord?”

“Pardon?”

“I believe you heard the question.”

She thought about it for a bit, and then said, “I don’t have one. He presides over the Caste Court. He meets with the Emperor on matters of governance. I owe him nothing; he owes me nothing.”

“Unless you choose to take refuge in the Caste Court.”

It was never going to happen. “I don’t understand the question.”

“No. You don’t. Lord Diarmat is part of the Dragon Court. In theory, you owe the Dragon Court itself no fealty; your oath of office is to the Emperor’s Law, and not directly to the Emperor himself. The Emperor is, however, your Commander, in a strictly technical sense. The titles the Dragons are given are a sign of public respect, no more.

“You would not, however, sneer publicly at your caste lord.”

“No.” She would never, if Marcus or the Hawklord had anything to say about it, meet the human caste lord.

“In a like fashion, you tender Diarmat the respect that is his due as a councilor of the Emperor. He is not, however, your Commander; the line of command for the Halls of Law passes from the Emperor directly to the Lords of Law. You are not therefore required to offer him any of the narrow range of salutes or obeisances taught in the Halls. He is not, technically, your superior, where in this case, technically means legally.”

“Which means?”

He smiled. His eyes were gold, and his lower membranes, unlike Diarmat’s, were entirely lowered. “It means that legally you owe him no deference. Legally, you owe the Lord of the High Halls and his Consort no deference, either.”

“I’m technically a Lord of the High Court.”

“Believe that I am conversant with your history in the High Court. You are, however, not required by Imperial law to comport yourself according to the dictates of the High Court, outcaste exception laws notwithstanding.”

“I’m not breaking any laws if I cease to breathe, either.”

“Indeed. You see my point.”

She could barely see his point, and begrudged the comprehension.

“The very deliberate and complicated social structure of the High Court evolved, in part, for what reason?”

“Sanabalis—”

“I have done you the courtesy of holding our classes in abeyance. If, however, it is necessary, I will rescind that courtesy.”

“Those are magic lessons!”

“Indeed. But what one learns in one discipline can be applied to others in unpredictable ways; education is a process.” He folded his arms across his chest, and waited.

Sanabalis’s meeting room was littered with chairs; the walls contained shelves with glass doors, and a mirror lurked in one of them. Kaylin availed herself of a chair, sitting heavily as she did. Lowering her face into her hands, she forced herself to think about what she knew of the High Court; it didn’t take all that long.

“The Barrani tend to kill each other as an idle pastime.”

“So it’s been rumored.”

“Barrani crimes are all confined to the Barrani Caste Court. They don’t reach the Imperial Court, ever.”

“So the Barrani commit no interracial crimes?”

She snorted. “Of course they do. But if there’s any chance we’ll catch them and they’ll be forced to trial in the Imperial Courts, the criminals wind up conveniently and messily dead. And often on our doorstep, because gods know the Barrani have more important things to do than clean up their own mess.”

Sanabalis actually chuckled at that. “An interesting digression. The rest of your answer?”

“There is no court of last resort among the Barrani. There are no Hawks or Swords that any sane Barrani will use. The Barrani are part of the City, but the only way they seem to really interact involves commerce. If I were Barrani, I would therefore have to live and act as if anyone—anyone at all—could be planning to assassinate me. Or if anyone could decide it was necessary if I somehow offended them.

“I could, if I felt powerful enough and secure enough, afford to offend the less powerful with impunity. I’m not sure I’d consider it wise. But…on the other hand, I suppose if I did behave that way, it would give people second thoughts about attempting to take me down.”

“Does this sound familiar?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “It sounds like any other sort of thug law. But it’s got more money behind it.”

“Good. The way in which it is clothed is crucial to its execution, but it is, in essence, something you do understand. It does not require your approval; survival has often been its own imperative.”

“You’re trying to tell me that the same is true of the Dragon Court.”

“No. The Emperor is your Commander.”

“Then what was your point?”

“Lord Diarmat is not. He is, however, dangerous in precisely the same way the Barrani are dangerous. He is not above the law—but if he chooses to break the law, the Emperor may grant him dispensation if he feels such extremes were merited.”

“And total lack of respect—”

“For a Dragon of his stature? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.”

“I’m sworn to uphold his laws. Saying that you killed someone because they annoyed you isn’t codified as acceptable, by those laws, anywhere that I’m aware of.”

“You are clearly not looking carefully enough.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “How did the lesson go?”

“He didn’t attempt to teach anything. I thought I’d get a list of things that were no-go around the Emperor. You know: don’t burp, don’t swear, don’t scratch your armpit, don’t wear green.”

“Green?”

“Or whatever color he doesn’t like. I thought he’d give me a list of acceptable ways to address the Emperor. With, you know, titles, and gestures—how to salute, how far down to kneel, whether or not you ever get to stand on your feet in his presence.”

“And?”

“He made me stand in front of his desk for half an hour without saying a word while he wrote a letter to the Hawklord.”

“I…see. And you did?”

“I work for Marcus. When Marcus is ticked, you stand in front of his desk at attention for as long as it damn well takes. I can do it for hours. I’m not great at it, and I don’t enjoy it, but that’s never mattered much.”

Sanabalis said crisply, “Good.” He smiled, but it was slender, and there was a trace of edge in the expression. “After the half hour?”

“He handed me a bunch of papers. I assumed they’d be the class transcripts from the Halls, which every prospective teacher seems to pore over. Even you.”

“They were not.”

“No. They were—” She sucked in air and almost pushed herself out of her chair. Or his chair. “Reports.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “They displeased you.”

“No one’s pleased to find out that every single thing they’ve ever done has been spied on, Sanabalis.” She did push herself out of the chair then. “But the last report—or the last one I looked at—was the Foundling Hall report.”

Sanabalis’s inner membranes rose. “Your reaction?”

“I sat on my reaction,” she told him, pacing around the chair. “But…the bracer started to light up.”

The Dragon Lord lifted a hand. “You did not speak?”

“No.”

“Bad,” he told her grimly. “But it will have to do. The class was ended at that point?”

“More or less.”

“I will attempt to augment your lessons with some of the material you expected to be handed. I am busy,” he added more severely, “but I will take the time to compose a list. You will not, however, be short of work.”

“I’m working on the outside desk at the moment. You’ve got a way to get me back in the streets?” It was the only possible bright spot in a day that had left her with the nausea that comes in the aftermath of fury.

“So to speak. I, too, have a letter which I wish you to deliver to Lord Grammayre. I guarantee that its contents will differ somewhat radically from those of Lord Diarmat’s.”

Kaylin went home in the dark. Not that it was ever completely dark in Elantra, and certainly not close to the Palace, where magic had been used the same way stones had: it made the streets passable. Kaylin was all for useful magic; she usually felt that there wasn’t enough of it.

Severn wasn’t waiting outside for her, which was a good sign. It meant he trusted her to more or less survive a lesson with Diarmat intact. But she missed his company on the way home, because she was, in fact, still fighting fury, and it helped to have someone she could both shout at and not offend while she did. There were no muggings, and nothing that looked as though it demanded legal intervention. There were, on the other hand, a few people who’d already spent too much time or money in a tavern.

She could unlock the front door of the apartment building in her sleep; unlocking it in the dark wasn’t much of an issue. Navigation in the dark only involved the narrow steps, and they were worn and warped enough that they creaked in a totally predictable way as she climbed them. It wasn’t late, yet. She’d eaten, and if she was hungry, she wasn’t starving. Hunger could wait until morning.

Her door was locked. It often was, but enough of her friends had keys that it wasn’t a guarantee; if Teela or Tain were totally bored, they’d show up and hang around. Tain was a bit more circumspect than Teela, who would often lounge strewn across the narrow bed while she waited. Severn, if worried, would also show up, but like Tain, he generally waited in her one chair.

Unlike Tain, he often tidied while he waited.

But he wasn’t waiting now, and the room was its usual mess. None of that mess generally caused her to trip and injure herself in the dark, as it was mostly clothing. There were, of course, magical lights that one could buy to alleviate the darkness—but those cost money, and Kaylin was chronically short of funding. She hesitated in the open door and glanced with trepidation at the mirror on the wall; she relaxed when she saw that it was, like the rest of the room, dark. No messages meant no emergencies.

No emergencies meant sleep.

Before she could sleep, she opened the shutters to her room and let the moonlight in. It wasn’t bright enough to read by; it was bright enough for navigation. There was one thing she had to check before sleep was a possibility. Kneeling beside the bed—and shucking clothing into the rough and very spread-out pile she’d, in theory, wash any time now—she pulled a smallish box out from beneath its slats and removed the lid.

Nestled among scraps of cloth that were used mostly for cleaning in the midwives’ hall, was an egg the size of two fists. Well, two of hers at any rate. It had been born during the inexplicable magical upheaval that had left the City with thousands of newcomers, and no place to house them before Tiamaris had volunteered his fief. Other children had been born during that time, and in the magical zone—but they’d been children with unusual features: extra arms, extra eyes, full speech. No one in the guildhall had any idea what was in the egg.

Nor did Kaylin. But when Marya had handed her the box—at the grieving and shocked father’s insistence that the egg be disposed of—she had dutifully picked it up and carted it home. It didn’t weigh much. She’d meant to mention it to someone who specialized in magical theory, such as it was, but she didn’t really want to hand it over to the Dragon Court, the Imperial Mages, or the Arcanum. This left a much smaller pool—of one—and her desk duty had kept her off her current beat. Which was, sadly, where the single person she had in mind lived and worked.

The egg’s shell had started out almost soft to the touch, but it had grown harder and stronger. She wasn’t sure if this meant the egg actually had something living in it, because she wasn’t sure if whatever it was could be sustained without magic. Which she didn’t have. At least, not on purpose.

And thinking that, she carefully removed the bracer she wore as a matter of course throughout most of her working days. Laying it to one side of the box, she lifted the egg out, set it on the bed, swaddled it in her own blankets, and curled around it protectively to keep it warm.

Morning happened, and judging from the fall of sunlight, she wasn’t late, yet. Her sleep had, to her surprise, been untroubled, which did happen a handful of days each year. She had time to fish food out of the magical basket that Severn had given her. Of all the magic she’d seen, this one was the most quietly impressive: it preserved food. Even bread. She wasn’t certain for how long, because food didn’t generally last long in her apartment; she’d have to test it one day.

She then dressed, snapping the bracer back into place on her wrist and rooting through the clothing she’d thrown on the floor the night before to fish out the two letters she’d been handed by two entirely different Dragon Lords. The forlorn and unhatched egg went back into its box, and back under the bed.

The walk to work ended with Clint and Tanner at the doors. Clint nodded, and Tanner said, “You keep arriving at work on time and people are going to start worrying.”

“Oh? Who?”

“The ones who are losing money.” He laughed.

She grimaced. “They’ve started a different pool.”

“I haven’t heard about a new one.”

“It’s called the end-of-the-world pool, but if you don’t like the odds, there’s one about the next call from the midwives.” They’d pulled her out of work during the day for the last three births; it meant she was on time for work, but still short hours.

Tanner chuckled and they stepped out of the way to let her pass. She ran a hand along Clint’s wings as she cleared the door, and heard his friendly curse at her back.

Caitlin was at her desk. “You’re early, dear. How did yesterday’s lesson go?”

“I’m still alive.”

“You don’t sound particularly happy about it at the moment.”

“Not at the moment, no. It only means I have to go back in three days.”

“That bad?”

“Bad enough that I now consider any other teacher I’ve had to be friendly and put upon.”

Caitlin raised a brow. “And that made you early?”

“No. Early,” Kaylin replied, removing the two sealed letters from her side pouch, “was for these. I have hopes that one of them will get me out of desk duty.”

“Kaylin…”

“And hopes that the other one won’t be an immediate call for my execution. They’re for the Hawklord.”

“Were they urgent?”

“They were delivered by Dragons. One of them, at least, was written by Diarmat.”

Caitlin winced. “Then at least one is urgent, for your sake.”

“The Hawklord’s busy?”

“Yes, dear. He and most of the Barrani Hawks are closeted in the Tower discussing the difficulties with the investigation into the Exchequer’s suspected embezzlement.”

Which meant he wasn’t going to take any interruption well.

“Head up to his office and speak with his secretary. My guess is he’ll interrupt the Hawklord, at least briefly.”

Kaylin shrugged. “My job was to deliver the letters; it wasn’t to stand over the Hawklord’s shoulder making certain he reads them.”

“Take them to his office, dear.”

The Hawklord’s office wasn’t actually the Tower, although that’s where he held most of his meetings; it was vastly more convenient for Aerians to reach, as the dome in the roof opened. He did, however, have an office, with a secretary whose function was similar to Caitlin’s, albeit for a single man and not an entire office full of Hawks.

She liked the office better than the Tower for a variety of reasons. Chief among these was the fact that the Hawklord’s office doors had no door wards. They barely had working hinges, on the other hand. Hanson sat behind his customary desk watching the door’s progress. Magic wasn’t needed for protection here; no one could sneak into this office through those doors.

“He’s not here,” Hanson said when she’d mostly managed to get the doors open.

“I know. He’s in the Tower with the Barrani Hawks.”

“Yes. And an expert who calls himself a Forensic Accountant.” Hanson grimaced.

“A what?”

“Don’t ask me. I just work here.”

Kaylin, who also just worked here, nonetheless tried to wrap her thoughts around the title, and gave up. “I have two letters I was told to deliver to him in person.”

“Do either of the sendees have any reason to want you dead or fired?”

“Not yet.”

Hanson held out a hand. It was large, square, and belied the rather bookish clothing he generally wore for office work. Too many calluses, for one. “Let me have them.”

She would normally have been more than happy to pass them off as his problem, but this time she was torn. She had hopes for the contents of Sanabalis’s letter, and pure dread about the contents of Diarmat’s. It didn’t matter, though. Hanson lifted one gray brow and said, “I’m not opening either,” in a flat tone of voice. “I recognize both seals. Were you told, in either case, to wait for a report?”

“No.”

“And you are absolutely certain you did nothing to offend Diarmat?”

“Nothing besides breathing.”

“Take a chair,” Hanson said, rising as he made his decision. “Take any chair in my office except the one behind my desk.”

Kaylin had been a bit of an explorer when she’d first been brought to the office. Hanson’s chair wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to her, even though she’d only sat in it a couple of times. Unfortunately, the last of those times had involved a rather irate citizen of great import to his Caste Court, an absent Hanson, and an absent Hawklord. It had not gone well.

She wasn’t thirteen anymore in any case; she took a chair by the wall nearest the desk and waited. Hanson came in maybe a quarter of an hour later; the windows here weren’t enchanted, so asking them for the time indicated a lower level of sanity or observation than the Hawks ideally liked in their employees.

“The Hawklord will see you. Now.”

“Is he pissed off?”

“He was not entirely pleased by the interruption, no. I don’t believe he holds it against you, on the other hand.”

“How badly is the investigation going?”

“It is not going well, and the Emperor is not pleased.”

Kaylin winced. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

The Hawklord’s Tower was empty when she arrived; she could see this because the doors were—thank the gods—already open. The landing in front of his Tower, on the other hand, was occupied. Teela was lounging against the height of the rails as Kaylin trudged up the stairs. She raised one dark brow in acknowledgment. “I saw Hanson. Two official letters, from actual Dragons, no less. Why were you at the Palace?”

“Etiquette lessons, if you must know.”

Teela frowned for a second, and then nodded. The fact that she’d asked at all meant the investigation was going very badly; normally, she would have known exactly where Kaylin had been the previous day. Teela had taken to office betting pools like fish take to water.

“You didn’t offend Diarmat, did you?”

“I believe my inferior existence is offense enough,” Kaylin replied, sliding into very clipped and precise High Barrani.

Tain chuckled. “He’s old school, Kaylin.”

“Meaning?”

“You’ll find out. Hawklord’s waiting,” he added. “And we’re not allowed back in until you’ve finished.”

Lord Grammayre’s eyes were an unfortunate shade of blue; his wings were at full height, but at least they were only partially extended. He held what appeared to be two letters in one of his stiff hands, and he looked up when Kaylin entered. He didn’t even tell her to close the doors; he gestured and they pretty much slammed shut at her back. Had she been Barrani, they would have closed on her hair. Or maybe not. Barrani hair never got in the way of anything.

“I have two completely conflicting requests, and I have very, very little time in which to reply. Are you aware of what either of these letters contain?”

“No, sir,” she said truthfully. She did snap a salute, and she did stand pretty much at rigid attention.

Lord Grammayre looked peaked. Had she been Caitlin, she might have asked him if he’d been sleeping at all; as she wasn’t, she didn’t dare. “Since neither request has anything at all to do with the Human Caste Court or the Exchequer, I almost consider the interruption a favor. Sadly, it is not a favor I can indulge in for much longer.

“Lord Diarmat, after an hour of extracurricular lessons, has decided that things would work more smoothly with a cocurricular schedule.”

Kaylin tried to make sense of this, and failed. “Cocurricular?”

“Yes. He would like your etiquette lessons—and his involvement in the same—to be more—” he glanced at the paper “—comprehensive. He feels that there is some danger you will take the lessons far too casually otherwise.”

“I’m still stuck on cocurricular.”

“Ah. The lesson schedule would become far more intensive, and the classes would be integrated into your duties to the Halls of Law. Your paycheck—and possible promotion, and yes, that’s also on my desk—would depend on your success. He feels that separation of his lessons and your duties are not—” again he glanced at the paper “—a strict advantage.”

Kaylin had drifted off the topic of cocurricular and Lord Diarmat, and latched onto the fact that a request for promotion—for her!—was on the Hawklord’s desk.

He lifted a pale brow, and then his eyes narrowed; they were still blue. He’d seen Kaylin almost daily since she was thirteen years old, and if she wasn’t that child anymore, he’d also become familiar with all the incremental changes time had made. He knew what she was thinking. “If,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I might actually have your attention for the next five minutes?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. Lord Diarmat’s vision of cocurricular would see you at the Imperial Palace for three days of each week, duty cycles notwithstanding. He specifically states some concern with your overall martial training and your deplorable self-indulgence; he wishes all trace of these deficiencies to be dealt with immediately.”

Three days of each week? “What about my beat?”

“You would obviously not be patrolling for the duration.”

“And the duration?”

“That was not specified, although I believe the implication is that his lessons will last until he is satisfied.”

“Or I’m dead?”

“If you feel that’s more likely.”

Almost ashen, Kaylin grasped at straws. “And the—the other letter?”

“There is apparently some miscommunication among the members of the Dragon Court; given the relocation of the refugees and the absence of Lord Sanabalis from the Palace for much of each day, that is understandable.” He glanced at the second letter. “Breathe,” he said without looking up.

She tried.

“Lord Sanabalis apologizes for any inconvenience his request might cause the Hawks, but his request is, for Lord Sanabalis, quite urgently stated.”

The Hawklord wasn’t known for either his kindness or his cruelty. Kaylin was privately wondering about the latter. While it was true she’d interrupted a critical meeting at a very bad time, it was also true that the interruption wasn’t her doing.

“He would like to see you seconded to the Imperial Court as an attaché.”

“A what?”

“I believe he means a general aide of unspecified expertise. His request, however, would clash badly with Lord Diarmat’s.”

“Why?”

“He wants you as a full-time aide for an unspecified length of time. You would not report to Sergeant Kassan; you would report directly to Lord Sanabalis.” The Hawklord lowered the hand that held the letters, and his irritation receded; the color of his eyes, however, was almost cobalt. “Your duties to the Court at this time would take you directly into the fiefs.”

“The fiefs? But—”

“There have been some issues with the resettlement.”

CHAPTER 3

“Issues?” Kaylin said, her voice sharpening. “What do you mean, issues?”

“I? I mean nothing. Lord Sanabalis has failed—entirely—to make explicit what those issues or concerns are. He has, however, stated unequivocally that the strangers, or at least one or two of them, would be comfortable, or perhaps comforted, by your presence. He acknowledges, of course, that the needs of the Halls of Law take precedence in this case, and that the jurisdiction is…hazy. He also feels, should we grant his request, Corporal Handred should accompany you.” The Hawklord looked at Kaylin.

“While I feel it inadvisable to annoy Lord Diarmat, three thousand homeless strangers—none of whom speak Elantran or Barrani—seem, to me, to be the greater concern. While the fief of Tiamaris is not within the purview of the Halls of Law, if accommodations cannot be safely made, the strangers will no doubt become our problem, one way or the other.

“I will therefore accede to Lord Sanabalis’s request, and I will write my regrets to Lord Diarmat. I will not, however, attempt to get you out of his extracurricular lessons. Is that understood?”

Kaylin nodded.

“Therefore, if you must be late—or worse, miss one—have a reason with which even the most punctilious of people can find no fault.”

“Such as being dead?”

“That would,” was the wry reply, “be acceptable, but I think it goes a tad far.” He exhaled. “Report to Lord Sanabalis directly upon leaving the Tower; he will have further instructions. Where it is possible, make your reports to Sergeant Kassan at the end of the day. He will no doubt have some issues with your placement, and this will mollify him somewhat. It is the only concession I can afford to make at this time.”

Kaylin nodded and offered as perfect a salute as she could.

“I will mirror Sergeant Kassan to let him know of your reassignment.” He placed one palm on the surface of his slender, tall mirror; the office—the one she usually called home when she wasn’t dealing with nervous, angry, or insane people—swam into view. At the center of that office, in image, as in life, was the bristling golden fur of a Leontine. “Sergeant Kassan,” the Hawklord said in brisk, clipped Elantran.

“What,” Marcus said, catching the same glimpse of Kaylin that she’d caught of him, “has she done this time?”

“At the moment? She has apparently made herself all but necessary to the Dragon Court. Lord Sanabalis has seconded her for ancillary work in the fief of Tiamaris; I have granted the requested redeployment. Please have Corporal Handred report in; I believe he’s in the outer office.”

“I’m losing two Hawks for how long?”

“I’m certain that, after deliberations with Lord Sanabalis, Private Neya will be able to answer that question.”

Marcus growled. His eyes shaded toward copper, and his fur began to stand up, increasing the size of his face. Kaylin, used to this, lifted her chin, exposing her throat. The Hawklord, however, was unmoved by this display of annoyance, and really, given Marcus, it was second-rate. He gestured briefly at the mirror, and Marcus’s image dissolved in a sea of silvered waves.

The Hawklord then turned to Kaylin. “I have an interrupted meeting to resume. Please tell the Barrani Hawks to get back to work on your way out.”

Severn wasn’t waiting for her by the time she reached Marcus’s desk; Marcus, however, was. He was also aware that the appearance of Kaylin’s partner would end most conversation—although Marcus’s idea of conversation suited most definitions of interrogation Kaylin had ever run across. “Caitlin said you had two letters.”

Kaylin winced and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“The second letter was also from a Dragon Lord.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marcus growled.

“Lord Diarmat,” she offered, aware that while this was what he wanted, it would in no way mollify him. She was right; he’d created three new runnels in the surface of a desk that already looked as if insane carpenters had gone on a drinking binge and then tried to have a carving contest.

“The letter’s content?”

“I didn’t read it; it was sent to Lord Grammayre.”

“Is Lord Diarmat going to be annoyed at your new assignment?”

“Yes, sir. But with any luck he won’t be annoyed at the Hawks.”

“I’ll speak with the Hawklord when he’s done. Corporal Handred is waiting.” He growled before Kaylin turned. “Try not to antagonize Lord Diarmat, Private. He’s not known for his abundance of goodwill. He is also famous for his utter lack of anything that could remotely resemble a sense of humor.”

With good damn reason. She managed not to say this out loud, but did turn to jog her way to where Severn was standing in order to leave an impression of good behavior intact.

Sanabalis was, of course, waiting for them in his usual rooms. Food was also—as it often was—waiting with him, albeit on small tables near the very heavy chairs that occupied the room. Sanabalis was, for a change, seated in one when they arrived.

“Corporal, Private,” he said, gesturing toward the food. “There may not be a reasonable opportunity to eat later on in the day; I suggest you avail yourself of what’s here.”

Kaylin took a chair closest to the food. She often wondered how—or what—Dragons ate, because she’d never actually seen them do it. Today was not to be the exception, but as she was hungry, food at home being sparse because of the insanity of her schedule and the fact that the market was either closed when she managed to crawl out of the office, or sold out of anything that looked remotely edible, she ate.

Severn joined her, but ate less. “What,” he said, while eating, “is the difficulty in Tiamaris? The borders of the fief have stabilized, haven’t they?”

“Tiamaris is still hunting down Shadow remnants and infestations within the fief boundaries; the few that he has failed to destroy are subtle.”

Very little destroyed the appetite of people who’d scrounged through fief garbage in their childhood, which is why Kaylin could continue to eat. Around a mouthful of something, she said, “Shadows aren’t known for their subtlety.”

He frowned. “You are well aware that that is not the case. Your experiences in the High Halls and in the Leontine Quarter are solid evidence that subtlety is not beyond their scope, nor planning.”

She gave him the point. “Are the problems caused by the Shadows?”

“Not in their entirety. I know you’re aware of the various building projects Tiamaris and his Tower have undertaken. What you are perhaps not entirely cognizant of is where the funds for that reconstruction have come from.”

“Funds?”

“Funds. Money.”

It was true. Until Sanabalis had, in fact, mentioned funding, she hadn’t given it a thought. Her experience with fieflords had made clear that the lords of the fief were never strapped for cash; it was just anyone else who lived under them who had difficulty. Tiamaris had dismantled Barren’s old tried-and-true method of bringing gold into the fiefs by strongly discouraging anyone who stepped foot across the Ablayne without a clear purpose. In only one of those cases had the discouragement caused friction with the Halls of Law, and in truth, not much.

Kaylin would have happily watched Tiamaris burn to ash anyone who’d made use of Barren’s previous, very illegal services. She’d have brought marshmallows. “You’re right. I have no idea at all where the money’s coming from. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s using Barren’s money, or what was left of it.”

“It would be a reasonable guess. It would not, however, be entirely accurate. He is using Barren’s money, as you call it. He is utilizing the people of the fief, as well, and some of that money has gone to their pay. But the damage done to the fief during the breach of the barriers was extensive, and most of the border-side buildings were destroyed, either during the incursion, or afterward, depending on the contamination.”

“Meaning Barren didn’t have enough money.”

“Meaning exactly that.”

“But Tiamaris is still building.”

“Yes. There have, however, been a few significant difficulties.”

Kaylin started to eat again, but she did lift a hand before the Dragon could continue. “Please tell me that this has nothing to do with the Exchequer and his alleged embezzlement.”

Sanabalis was notably silent. He was also, however, grimly pleased with the comment, in the way that teachers often are when a student says something unexpectedly clever. “You see the issue.”

She did, and she bit down on the bread a little too hard. “The treasury doesn’t have the money.”

“The treasury is, by no means, approaching insolvency. But the funds are greatly reduced for projects of an unspecified nature. In emergencies, tax levies could be raised—”

“I know this one,” was the grim reply. “I’ve done tax collector lookout before.” This was the polite phrase for guarding the tax collectors, who had the dubious distinction of being the most despised men in the City, bar none. “The Emperor can’t raise an unspecified levy without the Caste Courts bickering like starving dogs. He can’t, in this case, raise a specific levy without causing idiots to cross the bridge in resentful fury with torches.”

Severn, often quiet, said, “It would, on the other hand, rid us of dozens of idiots; the Swords would probably be grateful in the long term.”

“I concede that the Emperor would not be distressed to see them go, either. Be that as it may, there has been a slowdown in the purchase of the materials required for the reconstruction. Tiamaris has, of course, his own funds, but these have been appropriated. The issue of food was initially problematic—but I forget myself. The food is entirely an internal matter.”

“In theory, so is the reconstruction.”

“Indeed. The investigation into the Exchequer is not going as well as the Emperor had hoped.” He steepled his hands beneath his chin, teasing wisps of beard before he continued. “The funding is not the only problem, and frankly, were it, your presence would not be required.”

“Got it. Shadows, then?” She watched his expression. “It’s not just the Shadows.”

“No. The strangers—who call themselves the People in their own tongue, which we may adopt as their formal racial designation in the archives—have their own customs and their own experiences in dealing with Shadow, and those customs are not in accordance with fief customs.”

“Meaning?”

“They walk around more heavily armed than any previous fieflord’s thugs, they are between seven and eight feet tall, they are silent and while they are not immediately violent, they are not friendly. They do not keep curfew, which, given their size and ability with their weapons, is not actually an issue—for them. It has led to some speculation on the part of the humans living in the fief that they are Shadows themselves, or in league with the Shadows.”

Kaylin winced. “And since there are Shadows, of an unspecified and subtle nature, running around the fief—”

“Very good. You now understand most of the difficulties.”

“I do.”

“But?” He used the Elantran word for this.

“I don’t understand why it requires your presence in the fief. The fief of Tiamaris demonstrably already has a Dragon Lord of its own, and from all accounts he’s a damn sight more effective at scouring the streets for Ferals and other nightmares than any of the previous fieflords before him.”

Sanabalis nodded. “Your point is taken,” he said, rising. “I have one meeting before I am free to leave the Palace. I will leave you both here, and return when I am able to depart.”

“He didn’t answer the damn question,” she said—but only after the door had been closed for a good five minutes. Even Dragon hearing had its limits.

“You noticed.” Severn was frowning, but it was a slight frown.

“What?”

“I don’t think he thinks your presence in the fief of Tiamaris is necessary.” Before she could speak, he held up one hand. “I think he wants you there. Why?”

She grimaced. “I’d like to think I was necessary or useful.”

“But?”

“Diarmat also asked that I be seconded to the Palace. To him, directly, for more intensive lessons.”

“This occurred at the same time?”

“If I had to guess, Sanabalis actually wrote out his request first. But…he probably had some idea of what Diarmat would demand. You don’t know what he’s like, Severn.”

“I have a very good idea of what Lord Diarmat is like.”

“Is he still alive only because he’s a Dragon and they’re so bloody hard to kill?”

“Probably. We’re going to need to change,” he added.

“Why?”

“Fiefs.”

“They’ve got a Dragon for a fieflord. He’s trying to institute reasonable laws—and install the people who’ll enforce them. I don’t think the Hawk is going to matter one way or the other.”

He folded his arms across his chest, and Kaylin grimaced. “All right, I’ll ditch the tabard, but I’m not ditching the armor until I have a better idea of what we’re likely to be up against.”

Severn rose and headed toward the window view that Kaylin liked so much. From the slight angle of the back of his head, Kaylin guessed that he was looking at the Halls of Law, or at the flags that stood atop each of its three towers. But after a minute, he turned.

“We haven’t talked,” he said after a long pause.

“About what?”

He didn’t dignify the question with an answer, which was fair. Kaylin shifted in her chair in a way that was suspiciously like squirming. She hesitated, glad that there wasn’t much in the way of food; the only time she had trouble eating was when she was nervous, and a life of near starvation hadn’t managed to kill that response.

Severn said nothing, not with words. But he watched, gaze almost unblinking. It was hard to meet that gaze, and the floor suddenly became a whole lot more interesting.

“I don’t—” She wasn’t one of nature’s natural liars, and Severn deserved better than that. Plus, he’d know. He always did. “I almost can’t remember most of what happened when I was trapped in the…Other. No, that’s not what I mean— I remember it, it just doesn’t make sense. Here,” she said, thumping the ground heavily with her foot, “things are solid. The wood is hard. The carpet is soft. There’s wind and the noise of the street. Well, the halls, but you know what I mean. There’s food. There are people.

“There are no elements wandering around. There are no true names floating in the air like signposts. It’s normal—it’s normal, but it’s less—”

“Clean?”

“Maybe. Less simple. Everything there was absolute. To speak to any of it—elements, emptiness—I had to be as absolute as I could. I didn’t have time to be afraid.”

“You were afraid.”

She grimaced. “Yes, but on most days I have a half-dozen different fears pulling me in different directions; I balance them.”

“So, you’re afraid?”

“No!” She paused and looked up at his face again. “…Maybe.”

“Can you tell me what you’re afraid of?”

“On the wrong day? My own shadow.” It was a dodge, and he knew it. “…I’m not good at this. I suck at talking about anything really important.”

“You asked me why I love you.”

She nodded; she could hardly forget that.

“Can I ask you the same question?”

“Severn—”

“Why do you love me?”

She wanted to lie then. It was such a visceral reaction, her mouth was open and words were almost falling out. But she held them, offering different words in their stead. “Because you’ve always been there for me. Even, apparently, when I didn’t know it. There’s nothing you’ve got that you wouldn’t give me if I asked for it. You know me. You understand me. You’ve seen me at my worst, and you’re still here.” She sucked in air. “You’ll never ask me to do anything I can’t do. You’d never ask me to do anything that would hurt me. You’re stronger than I am, Severn. You always have been.

“I admire it. I…rely on it, even when I shouldn’t.”

“Kaylin, you think relying on anyone is proof that you’re worthless.”

“No—I don’t. I don’t anymore. I did. It’s true. But…if we can’t rely on each other some of the time, there’d be no point.”

“No point?”

“No point in people existing at all. There’d be just one thing. If what I heard was true, that’s all there was for a long time.”

“Then I don’t see the problem.”

“No, you don’t.” She rose and began to pace. “And I—I’m not good at talking.”

He waited, because he was good at waiting. “Are you afraid of losing me?”

“Yes. But not because you leave. Because you’ll die.” Gods, she hated this. She was squirming, he knew it. “I’m afraid,” she finally said in as neutral a voice as she could manage, “that you want me.”

“Want?”

“Want. Desire.”

He stared at her. This was different from watchfulness. “You’re not afraid of wanting me.”

“…No.”

“But you don’t.”

She walked to the window. Touched it with both her palms, framing the three Towers of Law that formed the triangular structure she called home. “It’s not that I don’t,” she finally said. “But I’m not afraid of what I want. No—sometimes I am, but not in that way. I’m not afraid of what it will do to me.”

“And to me?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have a lot of experience,” she finally said. “But the experience I do have—it’s all bad, Severn.” Swallowing, throat becoming drier by the syllable, she made herself continue, because it was important. “If I had been prettier, if I had been more helpless, I would have been forced into one of Barren’s brothels. If Morse hadn’t found me, if someone else had found me first—

“I know that life. I understand what it means. I understand what sex is between the girls who weren’t as lucky and the men who see them as something to buy. It’s about power, it’s about money, it’s about—sex.”

“Kaylin—”

“No, let me finish, because I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to say this again. For those girls, that’s all it is. If they love anyone, if they can, they mostly love each other because men are just business, or far worse. There’s no room in that for anything else.

“I didn’t have to suffer that.” She closed her eyes, blocking out the Halls of Law—and the temerity of her own transparent reflection. “I had Barren,” she said in a much lower voice. “I don’t—I can’t—talk about that. Not directly. Not yet. But you understand what I mean, right?”

He was silent.

“I didn’t want him. I never did. He was everything ugly to me, everything I feared. Everything I would have run from if I could. I can’t think why I didn’t. I would never be so afraid of him now. But—I wasn’t me, then.

“I remember him so well. I have nightmares about him. But I did what he wanted me to do because he wanted me to do it. I killed people because he wanted it. I—” She wanted to choke. “I can still see his face. When I think of—when I—it’s his face. It’s his expression. I don’t know if it was desire. I think it was. It was certainly about power. His, my lack. It was always about power.” She opened her eyes again. She could see echoes of her face, of her distant, thirteen-year-old face, in the glass.

“…I’m afraid. Of seeing that. Of seeing that desire on anyone else’s face. It’s me I don’t trust.”

“Kaylin—”

“I tried,” she continued, not looking at him. “When I was seventeen. I tried. We’d gone out together, we’d done a little drinking. I was attracted to him. I did want to be with him. He knew it; I knew it. We went back to his place—it was about the same size as mine.

“And he kissed me, and that was fine—it was awkward, but it was fine. But…there was more. I—I froze, and then I…I couldn’t stop myself. I broke his jaw. Teela thought it was funny. I panicked, I—he didn’t speak to me again for two months, and I don’t blame him. It’s just I—it’s what I saw. It’s what I saw in his expression. And he was a nice guy, Severn. He was a nice, decent guy. I knew he wasn’t Barren. I wasn’t thirteen. I wasn’t helpless, and I had a choice.

“But knowing all that didn’t matter. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t see that look on his face, that expression. I just—” She hit the glass hard. Nothing happened. “I don’t want to see that in you.” She turned then.

He was still standing, still watching her. “And Nightshade?”

It was so not the question she wanted to hear. She recoiled from it, as if it were a cockroach colony and she were food. But what she said was, “Ask me again later. I don’t have an answer, and I don’t want to find one right now.”

Because he was Severn, he nodded. He didn’t ask about their future; didn’t ask if they even had one. He didn’t ask her for empty words or for promises that she couldn’t make or wouldn’t keep.

Sanabalis took forty-five minutes to return, and if there had been any doubt about why he’d left, the distant, booming roar of Dragon “discussion” shook the floors. It was far enough away that Kaylin didn’t try to cover her ears. She wondered if it was possible to learn the language without being deafened.

Sanabalis, however, returned in different clothing. It wasn’t armor exactly—Dragons didn’t wear any armor that wasn’t natural. The wearing of their own armor in human form, however, made actual clothing difficult. He nodded his brief approval when he saw no obvious sign of the Hawk on their clothing. “A carriage will be waiting for us in the yard.”

The carriage took them to the Ablayne, no farther. Given that it was an Imperial Carriage, Kaylin understood why. Dragons were touchy about their personal land. Even Tiamaris. She glanced at Sanabalis.

“I’m surprised,” she finally said, when they stood at the foot of the bridge that led into the fief of Tiamaris.

“What surprises you?”

“You’re coming with us.” She glanced at Severn; Severn was content to leave the conversation in her hands for the moment.

“Oh?”

“You’re a Dragon. He’s a Dragon. It’s his territory and you serve the Emperor, which would be, for his purposes, the wrong Dragon.”

Sanabalis lifted a brow, and then a faint smile moved the corners of his lips. Not by much, though. “It is, as you surmise, tricky. I have been Lord Tiamaris’s teacher, and I am definitely his senior; I am his superior in most areas of knowledge. He, however, has always possessed better information about the fiefs as they are now than any of the rest of the Dragon Court. I do not serve Lord Tiamaris.

“But Lord Tiamaris serves the Emperor as a member of the Dragon Court. Therefore accommodations can be requested.”

“I’m surprised Diarmat allowed it.”

“Lord Diarmat is not the Emperor. He is, as you’ve no doubt surmised, the most conservative member of the Court, and not without reason. Lord Tiamaris accepted the Emperor’s request that I oversee some of the resettlement. The Emperor is concerned.”

Kaylin nodded and led the way toward the Tower automatically. Sanabalis, however, shook his head. “Lord Tiamaris is not currently at the Tower; he is waiting near the interior border.”

“Why?”

“There have been some difficulties. And no, before you ask, I will not elaborate. This is his domain, Kaylin; he will tell you what he wishes you to know. The etiquette that governs my presence here is of necessity more strict than any etiquette that governs yours.”

The walk to the border took longer than the walk to the Tower. The streets weren’t empty—but they were empty compared to the stretch of beat that Kaylin and Severn normally covered. Here and there, some obvious reconstruction was already under way, and in those locations, there were more people; they were busy enough that three strangers passing by didn’t elicit panic, although it did elicit the usual suspicious looks that were at home on the face of fief citizens anywhere.

Sanabalis paused when Kaylin did, and resumed walking when Kaylin did; he didn’t make any comment or otherwise attempt to interact with people. He did, however, pause in front of the small gardens that seemed to front most of the buildings along the streets.

“It’s Tara’s experiment,” Kaylin told him. These gardens, unlike the usual streetside fare, were entirely practical, and given to the growing of food. “I think some of the more damaged areas now have no buildings; they have larger gardens—small farms, really.”

“And the former occupants?”

“They lost a lot of people before Tiamaris took the Tower. And even if they hadn’t, no one would be stupid enough to complain to the fieflord about something as inconsequential as having a place to live.” She didn’t even attempt to keep the bitterness out of her voice, although she knew that particular fear was no longer warranted in this fief.

“You are wrong,” Sanabalis said. It surprised her.

“People complain to Tiamaris about having no roof over their head?”

“Ah, no. They do, however, speak to the Lady.”

“They have to get through Tiamaris first.”

“No. Apparently, they don’t. She hears them regardless.”

Kaylin smiled. “She’s nowhere near as terrifying as Tiamaris.”

“No, and that is strange to me; Lord Tiamaris has the hearing that all our race are born with. He cannot hear the words the people speak if they are judicious about their location; the Avatar can. She can also see what she chooses to see, if she bends her will toward it, no matter where within the fief’s boundaries it occurs. But she invokes a very strange awe in her people, and very little dread.”

“Have you met Tara?”

“I have.”

“And you don’t understand why she doesn’t terrify them?”

“No, I do not.”

“Was she wearing her gardening clothing?”

“I fail to see what her clothing has to do with the subject at hand.” Dragons.

It was fairly easy to find Tiamaris, when all was said and done. From about two blocks away—where blocks in this case were mostly defined by the charred remnants of what had previously been some of the sturdier buildings in the fief—Kaylin could see the strangers. They didn’t walk the way the rest of the mortals in the fief did; they walked as if they owned, or intended to own, the streets. They bristled with weapons, and although their armor wasn’t in the best of repair, it was a damn sight better than what the rest of the citizens were wearing.

Not that there were any “rest of” anywhere in sight.

If, however, the strangers had suddenly decided to become meek and terrified, it would still have been easy to find Tiamaris at this distance because he was, at the moment, a very large Dragon. She glanced at Sanabalis, who didn’t appear to have noticed.

“Is he always like this?”

“Frequently. The Dragon form is more robust.”

They made their way down the street, which attracted attention. It was easy to see why; they were the only more or less human-looking people who were actually approaching. “Please don’t tell me that they’re serving as his personal guard.”

“It is…an informal guard.”

“Great.” The very large sword that was being lowered in their general direction sure as hells didn’t look informal. It did, however, make Kaylin and Severn stop much farther away than guards or thugs usually did; whatever Barren had managed to scrape off the streets had seldom been an actual threat. She lifted both hands, and turned them, palms out, toward the two men who had lowered their weapons; Severn did the same, although his hands were closer to his weapons. The two eight-foot-tall giants exchanged a few words and started to head toward the taller outline of Tiamaris.

Sanabalis, however, had decided that waiting wasn’t in the cards. He roared. The two men stiffened, which gave Kaylin a moment of petty satisfaction. Tiamaris turned.

“You’ll have to teach me how to do that,” Kaylin muttered.

“If it were even possible, I would still refuse,” Sanabalis replied. “Lord Diarmat would find it…impertinent.”

Tiamaris parted the crowd of armed strangers by turning. They didn’t rush to get out of his way; they moved. For all their apparent bulk, they moved quickly. As they cleared enough street for a Dragon with folded wings, Kaylin saw Tara. Tara was, in fact, wearing her gardening clothes, and Morse was walking by her side, looking about as happy at this new set of guards as Kaylin felt.

Morse had been a lieutenant of the previous fieflord, but she’d made the transition to Tiamaris without much trouble. Beside Tara, she looked like a thug in the true sense of the word; her hair was still a very short, shorn crop, and her face still bore scars from earlier fights. When she smiled at all, it was a grim, black smile, and it usually meant someone was about to die. Or it had meant that. She did smile at Tara, but usually only when she thought no one else was watching.

Tara broke into a wide grin as Kaylin met her eyes. Kaylin knew that Tara could be aware of her presence the instant she set foot on the right side of the Ablayne, but she often seemed so surprised and delighted, the thought held no weight. She broke into a run, which ended with her arms around Kaylin, and Kaylin’s arms around her.

“Lord Sanabalis said you would come,” Tara said when she at last stepped back. “Hello, Corporal Handred.”

Severn also smiled, and it was an unguarded smile. “Lady,” he said, bowing to the fief’s title, and not the name Kaylin had given her.

“Did he explain the difficulty?” Tara asked.

“No. Now that the fief is Tiamaris’s, he feels any information has to come from Tiamaris.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m not a Dragon.” She did add when she heard Sanabalis’s snort, “I think it’s something to do with the etiquette of hoard law. Dragons are, by simple human standards, insanely unreasonable about their hoards.”

“Ah. It’s possible that he is entirely correct then.” She turned and smiled at Sanabalis, who appeared unimpressed with Kaylin’s description. “Thank you.”

He bowed to her. He bowed damn low.

Kaylin raised a brow at Morse, and Morse responded with a pure fief shrug. “What’s happening?” Kaylin asked Morse, stepping to the side to add a little distance between them and anyone who might be listening.

“We have three thousand eight-foot-tall people who can’t speak Elantran and have no place to live. They also have no sense of humor.”

“Neither do you.”

“Exactly. Consider the source of the comment.”

Kaylin chuckled—but she also winced. “Sanabalis implied there were other difficulties.”

“That’s how he worded it? ‘Other difficulties’?” Morse spit to one side.

Kaylin frowned. “How bad is it?”

“There are two problems. One, we’re trying to track down, but even the Lady is having some trouble; we’re not sure why.”

“That would be the subtle Shadow that Sanabalis also mentioned?”

“That’s not what we call it, but yeah. You’re here to help with that?”

Kaylin frowned, and then nodded. “That’s my guess. What’s the other problem?”

“The border boundary,” Morse said, voice flat. There were four possible borders that defined the fief of Tiamaris—but only one was a threat to the fief’s existence: the one that faced into the unclaimed shadow that lay in the center of the fiefs.

Kaylin almost froze. “The border’s supposed to be stable.”

“Oh, it’s holding. If it weren’t, we’d all—all—be dead by now. But the freaking Shadow across the fucking border is puking out whatever it can. Nothing small and easily killed, either; apparently the bigger one-offs can survive the ‘transition’ with some of their power intact.”

Kaylin sucked in air. “When the hells did this start happening?”

“Pretty much the same day they did,” Morse replied, jerking her thumb in the direction of the strangers.

“Believe,” Kaylin said after an uncomfortably sharp silence, “that they didn’t bring the Shadows with them.”

“Oh?”

“If I understood what was said correctly, they were fleeing from them.”

“And being followed.”

“I was there, Morse. If great chunks of Shadowy one-offs had followed them into Elani, believe I would have noticed.” But she hesitated. Morse, no fool, noticed. “What?”

“When they arrived, they did this funny thing with a bunch of drums and a lot of loud chanting. It was supposed to be some sort of purification ritual, but the end result? The Dragons—all four of them—took flight over the city while they did it.” Kaylin shook her head, glancing briefly at two of those four: Tiamaris, in full scales and wings, and Sanabalis, in slightly drab but official clothing. “And…the chanting was magical, somehow.”

This admission of the use of magic by obviously dangerous giants did nothing positive for Morse’s mood.

“But…something answered them. Something in the fiefs. If I had to guess,” she added quietly, “something from the heart of the fiefs.”

“What, it was some kind of fucking challenge?” Morse’s brows rose toward the nearly shaved dome of her head. “Are they insane?”

From a fief perspective, there could only be one answer to that question. But…this fief had become, almost overnight, an exception to the rules that generally governed the fiefs. Kaylin glanced at the large huddle of strangers—she’d have to ask Sanabalis what their own name for their race was because “strangers” wasn’t going to cut it—and said, “Not insane. I think they’re used to fighting a war with the Shadows, rather than locking the doors and praying a bunch.”

“Great.” Morse glanced at Tara, who seemed to be involved in a serious discussion with Sanabalis, while Tiamaris, over her shoulder—well, part of his jaw, at any rate—looked on. Severn was beside the older Dragon, listening intently.

Kaylin frowned.

“What?” Morse said sharply.

“There’s something I don’t understand.”

She was rewarded by something that was halfway between snort and grunt; the sarcastic comment that would have usually followed failed to emerge. For Morse, this was a big improvement. “What?”

“Tiamaris is fieflord in a way that Barren wasn’t.”

“You can say that again.”

Fair enough. “Barren didn’t hold the Tower. Tiamaris does.”

“And?”

“Holding the Tower at all should prevent your one-offs from getting through.”

Morse shrugged. “The Ferals get through.”

“I know; they get through everywhere. I’m not sure why.”

“Time to find out?”

“Well past.” Kaylin turned toward the discussion that was even now taking place without them, and as she did, Tara froze. It was a very particular stillness, and it reminded anyone who happened to be standing close by that Tara’s physical form, the form of her birth, was made of stone.

It was warning enough for Kaylin, but if it hadn’t been, there was another one that followed less than thirty seconds later: the strangers began to shout, and weapons began to catch sunlight and reflect it in a way that spoke of movement.

Morse swore. Loudly. But her brief word wasn’t equal to the task of carrying over the cries and shouts—directed, not panicked—of the strangers. “Kaylin!” she shouted.

Kaylin turned.

“Incoming!”

Sanabalis’s eyes turned instantly orange as Tiamaris swiveled his head and roared. Kaylin’s ears were still ringing when the fieflord spread wings, bunched legs, and pushed himself off the ground; it was a miracle of grace and movement that prevented those wings from knocking anyone else flying. Tiamaris roared again as he rose above the heights of the standing structures erected along the border—they were few, and they were clearly meant as lookouts and not living quarters.

Severn had already unwound his weapon chain; Morse had a sword in hand. But Morse remained close by Tara, rather than running to join the giants. After a brief glance at Severn, Kaylin headed toward those giants, her own daggers still sheathed. Severn joined her; Sanabalis did not. But Tiamaris’s shadow passed above them as the drums began their rolling thunder.

What kind of people carried drums into a war zone anyway?

Kaylin noticed, as she approached the main body of the strangers, that there were no children here. There were men—and women—who looked as if they’d left youth behind, but they carried their weapons with the same grim determination that the younger men and women did. If any of them had ever survived to be elderly, they were also nowhere in sight.

They noticed her, but they were accustomed to a lack of clear communication from the humans and made no attempt to question her; they did, however, let her pass into their midst. She briefly regretted her armor; it was hard to shove it out of the way, and as she couldn’t, she couldn’t expose the marks on her arms with any ease. Those marks, the strangers did recognize in some fashion.

But Severn spoke a single curt word. “Bracer.”

Her reply was less civil. She shed splints, exposing the heavy golden manacle, and she crushed gems in sequence to open the damn thing. It clicked, she removed it and tossed it over her shoulder, remembering after it had left her hand that there were enough people behind her that it might actually hit someone. No one, however, shouted in outrage, and better yet, no one attempted to remove her head from her shoulders, so she moved in the direction of the drumming itself.

The drummers were standing behind a line of men and women who faced the interior of the fiefs; there were four drums in total that Kaylin could count. The men who beat them had weapons at their feet, but they were otherwise intent on stretched skin, not incoming danger. The four drums circled three people, however, and Kaylin recognized one of them: Mejrah. She was the oldest stranger present, she was about a foot shorter than the People standing beside her, and her eyes were all whites.

CHAPTER 4

Mejrah was not a door ward, but the hair on the back of Kaylin’s neck began to rise, and the marks on her skin began to ache in their usual protest at the presence of magic. Her exposed arm was also, damn it, glowing softly; the runes were a pale blue. At the moment, however, the visible marks gave her one solid advantage: no one stood in her way, and anyone who happened to be there moved.

Severn crowded her back to take advantage of the brief openings; he moved, as he often did, like a cat.

“Kaylin, twelve o’clock.”

Twelve o’clock, like positions ten to one, was occupied by large, weapon-wielding men; it was also briefly illuminated by bursts of angry, orange flames. The flames were close enough that Kaylin could feel their instant heat, and far enough away that she didn’t burn. But in the wake of fire, she could see the shape of something dark and ungainly rising above a horizon composed of tall warriors. Whatever the creature was, it was not small.

Size, in Shadows, wasn’t necessarily directly proportional to their power. But appearance was often an indicator. The creature was not being helpful in this regard: it didn’t seem to have a form. Instead, Shadow rose and fell, like black snowdrifts in a very bad storm. Like snow, the blackness accreted. Dragonfire seemed to cause it some damage—but not enough to stop it or destroy it.

The men spoke in short, sharp bursts; they were clearly giving orders in harsh, guttural syllables. Mejrah’s voice soared above them, twining as it did with the two voices of the men who stood on either side of her, as sightless as she. Their voices formed words, and these words were tantalizingly familiar to Kaylin; she couldn’t understand them, but she felt as if she should. She glanced at Mejrah, and from her to the air just above the old woman’s hands; it was wavering, as if it had substance and texture.

Kaylin expected to see words form in that air: ancient words. True words. Instead, light grew, curling in on itself as if it was a trapped, compressed cloud.

The creature drew closer and closer to the boundaries, and as it did, it opened what might—might—have been a mouth, and it began to speak. To Kaylin’s surprise, she recognized some of the language. Not enough to understand it, of course—that would have been too easy. It wasn’t the ancient tongue, though—it was the tongue that the strangers spoke, and were speaking even now.

They were shouting at the creature, and from their stances, it appeared that they were taunting it. Had she not been so much on edge, her jaw would have hit the ground and bounced. Every instinctive reaction she’d developed over the course of her life screamed in protest: this was suicide. Then again, so was standing still, which they were notably all doing.

Had they been anyone else—in particular, people who would understand a word she shouted—she would have started to shout orders of her own. As it was, she reminded herself, firmly, that they had spent most of their lives fighting Shadows in one way or another. If they were standing there while Mejrah was doing a complicated form of magic that would have had the Imperial mages looking down their noses in contempt, they had to have a reason for it.

Tiamaris roared and the men on the ground took up his cry; she thought they were attempting to repeat what he’d said. The timbre of their voices suited their size; it wasn’t Dragon, but it had enough strength behind it not to make a mockery of the word itself. The drumbeats began to pick up speed until all sound was a collision: Mejrah, Tiamaris, the warriors on the ground, and the pounding beat of the skins themselves.

And then, suddenly, there was silence. Light leaped from sky to ground, passing through the raised weapons of the strangers. The blades absorbed light instead of reflecting it, as if they were being anointed.

The Shadow roared; it was not a dragon roar—but it was as loud, as intense, as Tiamaris at his peak. It was also cold and dark enough to devour light and the things that came with it. Kaylin took a step back, although she wasn’t in the front line; the warriors, however, didn’t.

The Shadow continued to roar, and as it did, the ground around it began to heave. That ground, the surface of the street, and the hint of the buildings that had once occupied it, were black and white, leeched of color. They were soon leeched of their form, as well; they shimmered and began to fold in on themselves, condensing as they did into vastly less-stationary shapes. She’d seen something similar once before, on the very edge of the fief of Nightshade. Where the moving, shambling mass of attenuated Shadow had been, more grew, separate and distinct from it.

She now understood why the front was so heavily occupied; in less than five minutes the whole of the ground on the other side of a border that suddenly felt amorphous and theoretical had literally risen in fury. The newer shapes took on a solidity of form that the central Shadow hadn’t: they stretched to eight feet in height, growing limbs as they did. For the most part they had two of each—arms and legs—although the little details wobbled if Kaylin examined them for long. They were disturbing because they didn’t so much walk as glide, and they were utterly silent.

Then again, the mass at their center was doing enough shouting for a small army, which was convenient for it, as that’s what it appeared to be raising. It began to move through the rain of Tiamaris’s fire, and Tiamaris, wings spread, flew once over it. The creature threw some part of itself, as if a tendril, at the moving Dragon.

He dodged, but Kaylin could see he’d been hit; he didn’t bleed, but the Shadow darkened one wing and began to spread. She drew one sharp breath, but before she could shout, the strangers did. Tiamaris banked, breathing fire as he made his way toward the earth on his own side of the border; he landed behind the front line, behind where Kaylin now stood. She glanced over her shoulder to see Tara moving down the street. Given her height, it would have been impossible to see her if she’d actually been walking; she wasn’t.

She was flying; her back had sprouted familiar Aerian wings. She headed directly for Tiamaris, and as Kaylin turned back to face the border, the Shadows arrived.

Shadows could, in theory, be stopped by the usual things: swords, clubs, crossbows. The Ferals that had terrorized the night in the fiefs of Kaylin’s childhood—and still did—could be killed. They just couldn’t be killed easily, they were so damn fast.

But the Shadows she’d encountered in the High Halls or in Barren, just before Tiamaris’s reign, had been different. They were visually distinct, for one; they were often larger than a good-size horse; they had an indeterminate number of limbs, heads, or jaws, and the jaws could frequently open up at the end of anything: tail. Forearm. Stomach. Some had no eyes; some had eyes where every other part of a body would otherwise be. Some could fly, some could float, some seeped like the spread of thick liquid; some could speak.

The speech was always disturbing.

It was disturbing now. It wasn’t the tenor of the voice, it wasn’t the words—because at the moment, the words were unintelligible to Kaylin. It was the fact that they could speak, think, and communicate at all. Ravenous, efficient Ferals felt almost natural. Moving, dense mist shouldn’t have been able to keep up a steady stream of continuous speech, continuous command.

But the words came out of the darkness. It drew closer, and as it finally reached the edge of the border—a border defined entirely by eight-foot-tall warriors—black mist cracked and shattered. It had shattered because what it contained was too large: the thing at its center—still speaking—began to unfold, gaining height and width as it did.

It was tall: half again the height of the warriors it now faced. But unlike many of the one-offs, as Morse called them, this one had two arms, two legs; it had, more or less, one head. The head was massive, and it was nauseatingly unstable, the line of mouth and nose and what might have been eyes wavered like a heat mirage. That wasn’t what was remarkable about it, though.

It wore armor.

And it was recognizably armor. It was chitinous, but so was Dragon armor when worn in human form; it was sleek, and it covered the whole of the body, except of course the face. It shone, reflecting light rather than absorbing it. The Shadow had continued to speak as it unfolded, revealing itself to the men and women who now waited in grim silence. But when at last it drew its weapon, it, too, fell silent, signaling an end to speech.

An end, Kaylin thought, drawing her daggers to life. She watched the giant raise his sword in two hands, lifting it over his head and exposing the whole of his chest to do so.

And she watched the bolts that flew—from where, she wasn’t certain—to strike that chest and that armor. All but one bounced; one snapped. The sword plunged toward the earth, and the men who stood beneath it; they had raised their own weapons, but they weren’t fools; they moved. The sword crashed into the ground, literally breaking it.

Kaylin leaped to one side of the fissure that was opening beneath her feet, cursing in full Leontine. Nothing she had seen when Barren had ruled this fief and the borders had gone down had been as bad as this.

Mejrah shouted; her voice was higher and rougher than the voices of the men, and it carried. The warriors regrouped a few yards away from the armored giant, standing their ground as the Shadows that he had summoned poured toward them.

This shouldn’t be happening. Kaylin knew it. The Tower was active, and it had a Lord; that had been the whole damn point. She backed up—it was that or be trampled—and she saw that the Shadows had changed their formation: they were flowing into the fissure the sword had made, following the damage done.

Fully half the warriors on either side of the gap in the ground now turned their weapons upon the invaders, and those weapons—lit, still, by the brilliance of the odd light Mejrah and her two companions had chanted into existence—cut through Shadow as if it were insubstantial mist. But insubstantial or no, the Shadow burned.

It also attacked. This army of summoned Shadow was in no way as impressive as the summoner, but it didn’t have to be: it was still chaotic, amorphous, unpredictable. The uniformity of form that had existed before the lesser Shadows had attempted to cross the border through the breach melted away, and the Shadowy forms that had echoed the warriors were lost. The separation between the forms was lost, as well, as the warriors struck; the Shadows began to bleed into one another, combining and congealing into something vastly less human in appearance.

It was almost a relief. She lifted a dagger, reversed her grip on it, and threw it cleanly toward an emerging eye; Shadow eyes, in her experience, generally did more than just see things. The throw was mediocre; the dagger embedded itself into the iris, not the pupil. In a normal creature, this would have been fine, but the Shadow had pupils the size of Kaylin’s fist. It couldn’t see her from that eye, but it turned the bulk of its moving form—which was legless—in her direction, while the warriors hacked bits and pieces off its body.

Those pieces dissolved, seeping into the crevice itself; the Shadow continued to move toward Kaylin. Her dagger slowly disappeared into the damaged eye, as the eye transformed itself into a bleeding mouth. Damn it. She leaped back as another eye began to emerge; this time, it was lidded, and this time, her dagger bounced. As it did, the lid snapped open.

Damn it! Eyebeams lanced the ground. Clods of dirt and broken stone rose in chunks, and a shout went up from the warriors, one of whom hadn’t been lucky enough to dodge in time. He went down; the rest of his companions, instead of running for cover—which was admittedly a lost cause this close to the border—formed up. They parried the damn beams.

No fool she, she threw herself forward, rolled between two of them, and came to her feet. Or tried.

The ground shook, causing her to stumble; the armored giant had once again brought his sword crashing into the packed dirt and cracked stonework on the edge of the border itself; the rupture traveled across the boundary. The giant, however, did not. No, Kaylin thought, watching him. He couldn’t. And the only purchase his Shadows had were in the crevices themselves, at least until the barrier was breached.

She turned to look for Tara and found her easily. The Avatar was glowing. She still had wings, but her face looked like alabaster: white, cold, and hard. Gone were the dirt-stained, slightly oversize clothes of a fledgling gardener; the Avatar’s clothing, it appeared, was whatever she desired it to be. At her side, but grounded, stood Tiamaris, and at his side, still encumbered by the frailer human form, stood Sanabalis. Severn was on the other side of the first crevice, and he was working his chain and its terminating blades.

Tiamaris left the warriors as they hacked away at both eyebeams and the physical body that was shooting them so chaotically. He turned his attention to one of the three new breaks that straddled the edge of his fief; Tara flew to a different one. Sanabalis grimaced, and then walked—quickly for a man who affected age—toward the last. He still hadn’t bothered to shed the human form, but he didn’t need to be in Dragon form to breathe fire.

Clearly age made some difference; the fire was white, and it was hot enough to cause the ground to glow red. The small amount of Shadow that had leaked into the crevice over which Sanabalis kept watch began to smolder, and black smoke rose as it screamed. For a puddle, it made a lot of noise. Morse joined Sanabalis; she had a long sword, but she stayed behind the Dragon Lord, watching the ground intently. When tendrils rose up the sides and tried to find purchase in the ground above, she cut them down without blinking.

Kaylin cursed as the earth shook again. This was getting them nowhere; the giant could make cracks in the ground all damn day and he didn’t seem to be running out of Shadow to fill them. He couldn’t cross the border; that much was clear. He tried; she could see him straining to move, and she could see the sudden stillness that made his failure clear.

Her arms and legs were aching now, which she expected, given the magic. What she didn’t expect, as she turned her full attention to the armored giant, was the way her vision began to blur. This was not the time to pass out, and as she’d had some experience with that on her drinking binges with Teela and Tain, she recognized some of the signs.

But she hadn’t been drinking with the two Barrani Hawks in months; she certainly hadn’t been drinking today. She forced herself to focus, and as she did, the whole of the armored giant snapped into place with a sharp clarity that was so sudden it made her teeth rattle. It wasn’t his size or his shape or the way his blade—which she doubted she could even lift—was drinking in both Shadow and light; it wasn’t the way his armor glowed, or even the way his eyes did—because he had eyes and she could suddenly see them.

It wasn’t even the movement of his mouth, the way his lips formed a continuing chain of syllables that she couldn’t quite force into words. It was his name. She could see it as clearly as she had ever seen a name before, but for the first time, she actually understood what it was she was seeing. The border that he struggled against was also completely visible to Kaylin as she watched him. It, like his name, had form and shape in a way that it had never had before.

It was hard to look away, and she could only manage it for a few seconds. But the brief glance the effort afforded made at least one thing clear: the Shadows that crossed the border had no similar words at their heart; they had no substance. Which was a stupid thing to think of creatures that could destroy anything standing in their way.

Then again, so could tidal waves and earthquakes, and no one tried to reason with them.

She turned back to the giant, and to the word that was at his heart. The rune itself wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t ugly; it was, just as any other ancient word she’d glimpsed, composed of familiar broad strokes, fine lines, dots, and hatches. Its meaning wasn’t reflected in its visible shape. It wasn’t necessary. She could read it. What she couldn’t easily do was tease meaning out of it, which was what reading was supposed to be about.

“Kaylin!” Severn shouted. Something was wrong with his voice, although it took her a minute to figure out what it was: it was the only shout she could hear; all the rest of the noise had vanished. The movement of blades, the shouting of indecipherable orders, the crackling of Dragon breath, had suddenly gone mute. She turned—tried to turn—in Severn’s direction, but her legs had locked in place. She couldn’t take her eyes off the rune. Even the form that enclosed it on all sides was now a translucent black with shiny bits. The weapon that extended from both of the giant’s long arms was the only other part of it that was as solid as the word—but the two weren’t connected.

She squinted, looking at the sword, in part because she could. There, along the flat of the blade she could see carved—and glowing—runes. They were, like the giant’s name, ancient words. She cursed in Leontine, but the words apparently failed to leave her mouth, because she couldn’t hear them, either.

What could she hear?

The movement of a giant. The whistling fall of his sword. The muted movement of Shadow, which sounded like the rustle and gather of fallen, dead leaves in a dry wind. The earth, in the universe her ears now inhabited, was not being broken; the Shadows, in the same universe, weren’t speaking.

She was still frozen in place, although time hadn’t stopped. She tried to step back, tried—again—to turn, with no effect. Taking a deep breath, she accepted the inevitable and took a step forward. Forward worked. Of course, forward led her to, and not away from, the giant; forward led her to, and not away from, the border. She was momentarily glad that she couldn’t hear anyone else because she was fairly certain at least a handful of people were now shouting choice phrases at her in their native tongues.

But the border yielded to her in a way that it didn’t yield to the would-be invaders: with ease, and without the necessity of a lot of collateral destruction. The landscape didn’t magically change with the crossing; the colors didn’t return; neither did sound. But the runes developed a texture and a dimension as she approached them, which made the sword look decidedly more unwieldy.

The giant noticed her only when she was five yards away. His eyes widened slightly, and his sword arm—well, arms, given the overhand swing—stilled. He then turned toward her; the word at his core didn’t shift at all.

But it wasn’t a complicated word. It wasn’t like the name of the Outcaste Dragon; it wasn’t as immense as the name of a world. Kaylin began, as the giant slowly ambled toward her, to speak it. To speak his name, even though she couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Speech was now an act of instinct. She wasn’t speaking to make herself heard or to be understood; she wasn’t speaking to communicate. She was buying time, because she had no doubt at all that if the giant reached her, speech would be impossible. Breathing might also be an issue.

Names in the old tongue had syllables that, in any other language, would compose an entire paragraph’s worth of words. Or a page. Or a book. They couldn’t be spoken quickly in a breathless rush; enunciating them at all was like trying to speak with a mouth full of molasses. It was messy, it took effort, and it was probably unpleasant to watch.

But as the syllables came, the giant’s steps slowed and faltered, as if he was keeping time to her awkward struggle to speak. To speak, she realized, to him. The giant was, or had once been, a man. Not a human; humans didn’t have names like this at their core. But inasmuch as Dragons and Barrani were alive, he had once been alive.

His sword was no longer raised above his head; he lowered it, letting one hand fall away. The free hand, he raised in her direction, where it tapered from fist to point. She continued to speak, but as she did, he began to speak, as well. His voice was the low rumble of moving earth—a Dragon’s human voice, but slightly deeper and slightly fuller.

She couldn’t understand a word of it.

But even as she thought it, she realized that understanding what he meant to say wasn’t quite the same as understanding its effect: he was trying to tell her his name. He was trying, as she was, to speak the whole of it even as he closed the distance. He was also going to kill her if he could; that was clear. But he knew that if she knew his true name, she could prevent him. This utterance was the whole of his attempt at self-control.

And he wanted it.

His desire gave her strength; his speech gave her attempt a more solid foundation. She continued to speak, but as she did, she understood why Mejrah and her companions chanted in unison: she was speaking his name as a harmony to his speech. It was like song, like music, like a chorus of two. It grew louder as she grew more certain; it came faster, because she was no longer struggling to find, to feel, the syllables. Every syllable spoken caused him to lose height.

When he at last reached her, he was a mere eight feet—or eight and a half—in height, and his blade was no longer so big it could stave in rooftops. And as she spoke what she knew were the last three syllables, the blade fell from his hands, landing on the ground between their feet.

She looked at him. The armor still girded him, but he was now the size and shape of…of a refugee. He wasn’t young; he might have been older than Severn, but it was hard to tell; if he had a name, he should be immortal.

At least in this world.

His hands were shaking as he lifted them and removed his helm. In the dark light of altered vision, the helm shone like polished ebony as it rested in the crook of his arm. His eyes were clear, and they were a shade of gold that looked both familiar and wrong in his face. He spoke again, and this time, she lifted a hand and walked toward him slowly, until she could touch what she could still clearly see: his name, the name he had spoken with her, and by speaking, had given into her keeping. When she touched it, she could hear his voice so clearly it was almost a song.

“Chosen,” he said softly. “You are Chosen.”

Kaylin nodded; her arms were glowing so strongly the runes could be seen.

“But you are not of the People.”

“Not of your people, no. Do you know where you are?”

“I am in the heartland,” he replied. It made, of the word heart, something to be dreaded or loathed.

“Do you know what you were doing?”

“Yes. I was summoning my forces to do battle against the fortress of…our enemy.” He lifted a mailed hand, and removed, with effort, a gauntlet. His hands were callused and scarred; he lifted them to those startling eyes, dimming them a moment.

“Call them back.”

He nodded, and lifted the mailed hand. “I cannot hold them for long,” he told her. “Not as I…am.” He bowed to her then. “I can send them from the border for now.”

“And what will you do?”

“I will be called, sooner or later, and I will follow.”

“You can’t—”

“Can you give me back my name, Chosen? Can you, when you cannot take it and use it as your own? I would serve you, could you hold me. But the name is not known to you alone.”

Even as he spoke, she heard the whispers of a distant voice.

“Maggaron,” she said softly. And then, in the silence of thought, Maggaron. It wasn’t the whole of his name as she’d struggled to pronounce it, but it was the expression of what she’d achieved. Just as Nightshade’s name had been, and was, although this was the first time she understood the fact as fact.

He smiled; it was a pained, tortured expression. Yes. The mental bond came with the true name.

Are you alive?

Is this life? I would not be considered alive by the People.

Could they cleanse you?

Ah. No. It is not…an infestation or a contamination of that nature, Chosen. I am used against myself; nothing else is required.

Kaylin snorted. “You’re not a twenty-foot-tall giant; you didn’t get that on your own. You’ve been living in shadow, in the Shadows, for how long?”

“What does time signify here?”

“Spoken like an Immortal,” she snorted. She heard shouting, voices, and one loud roar, as the world suddenly returned; she turned to meet it.

The road was a mess because it wasn’t really road anymore; there were patches of it that were still glowing an unpleasant orange, and whole new ditches that would kill any horses anyone was stupid enough to drive this far into the fief’s interior. But there were only a few bodies on the ground, and most of those were moving, albeit not without help.

Morse was bleeding; something had lanced her cheek. She didn’t appear to notice, and not even Tara fussed over Morse when she decided an injury was beneath contempt. But it was Mejrah’s voice that was clearest, because Mejrah was shouting or crying—or both—as she pointed at Kaylin.

No, not at Kaylin. At the man who stood before her in his odd armor, his name exposed and held beneath the flat of her open palm.

CHAPTER 5

“Kaylin.” Tiamaris’s voice was the low rumble of moving earth. “Step back across the border.”

Kaylin frowned. From where she was standing, she could no longer see it—not that it had ever been all that clear when there wasn’t a small army of Shadows waiting along its edge. “Can I bring him with me?”

Smoke—a literal stream of it, forcefully expelled—eddied around her feet. Before the fieflord could follow it with words, Mejrah approached Kaylin, her hands lifted and turned palms out as if to imply that she was helpless. She spoke to the armored man, her voice low enough that it broke on syllables.

The man, still facing Kaylin, moved his head toward the old woman. His expression as he did could have broken stone hearts. Mejrah, however, turned to Kaylin and spoke rapid, agitated words—none of which made any sense. Language lessons had never seemed so profoundly important; unfortunately, no one present was yet expert enough to teach them.

“What is she saying?” Kaylin asked Maggaron.

“Can you not understand her words?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I could.”

His brows rose in genuine surprise. “But—you are Chosen.”

“I can’t walk on water,” she replied tersely. “And you clearly understand her. What did she say?”

“She wishes to know if what you have done is stable.”

“Tell her I have no idea.”

He did. Kaylin was running through Leontine phrases in her mind.

“She asks if you know who I am.”

“Tell her—” Kaylin bit back the flippant response. “Does she know who you are?”

He didn’t repeat the question; instead, he nodded. When he began to speak again—to Mejrah—Kaylin listened. But she listened, if it were possible, with her hands; she listened to the word that she hadn’t released. It was warm, and it was bright; if she looked at it too long it burned itself into her vision, the way the sun could at the wrong height.

“Ascendant,” Mejrah said. Kaylin could hear two words overlapping each other as the older woman spoke. It wasn’t cacophony, but it was disturbing. “How is it that you come to be here?”

“Do you not understand? You are here.”

“We came through the emptiness. We—all of our people that could be gathered—walked the gray space and the hungering void. We are here. But you…” She hesitated.

“I fell in battle.”

“Yes. On plains far from these streets and this…city. But even here, the Shadows exist.” This last was said with resignation and bitterness.

“Yes.”

“They are not so strong here; the war in these lands has barely begun. We will fight,” she added, her voice a low growl.

Maggaron’s smile was sharp and brief. He raised an arm in salute.

But the older woman was not yet done. “We did not think to see Ascendants again. How did you travel here?”

“I…did not travel here.”

Mejrah was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was harder—but it was also more brittle. “How is it that you command the darkness? How is it that you fight at the behest of our enemy?”

He flinched and turned away from her—but turned back as if shorn of will. “There is truth,” he finally said, “in the stories of the Ancients. The Shadows spoke my name, and they knew me, and when they bid me follow, I could not disobey for long, although I did struggle. I came, at last, to the heart of the Shadow—and it is the heart of the world, Mejrah. What I have seen—what I have touched—” He fell silent. “I have fallen. But there is beauty and majesty in the Shadows; there is—there could be—freedom.”

“If you were free,” Kaylin asked, “would you stay in the Shadow?”

His smile was bitter. “No, Chosen. There is no freedom for me now. What they have, they hold, and they will hold it—”

“Until they’re destroyed.”

He shook his head, and his face developed the expression that Kaylin most loathed: pity. “They cannot be destroyed. They are eternal; they live and breathe and move and change. They defy death, just as—”

“As you do.”

“No, Chosen. Their will is stronger than any other force they have encountered. They live in the web of the knowledge of worlds, and they feed from it. They move along its strands, and they change whatever they touch. They speak all languages, they can live in any environment. They require no breath, no warmth, no food.”

“If they were that powerful, all worlds would already be Shadow. All of them. We can fight them. There are people here who are also powerful and ancient.” She was acutely aware she wasn’t one of them.

He did not speak; instead, he looked toward Tiamaris and Sanabalis. And then, to her great surprise, he bowed. His armor clanked. She wondered, given its weight, if he’d be able to stand up again without teetering, because she doubted she could have. “They are Dragons,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He rose with an enviable ease. “They are the firstborn, and the oldest. Do you not understand what they are?”

A brief memory of Diarmat’s first class came to mind. It was hard to feel any awe for someone you wanted to strangle so badly. “They’re Dragons,” she said.

“Kaylin.”

Kaylin turned to the fieflord. His eyes weren’t orange; they were an unfortunate shade of red. Sanabalis was now standing by Tiamaris’s side; his eyes were orange. And unlidded.

“I have his name,” she told them. And then, after a pause, “He has one.”

The two Dragons exchanged a glance. Sanabalis said almost gently, “I do not believe that is possible if he is of the People.”

“Why?”

“They are mortal. They age and they die.”

“So am I, and I have one.”

The Dragons exchanged a more familiar glance. It was Tiamaris who answered. “And that is, of course, information that is best shouted loudly at the edge of a fief, where Shadows are dominant.” His breath was a plume of bright-colored flame. “Do you hold his name?”

“Yes. But so do they.”

“They?”

Actually, that was a damn good question. She didn’t have an answer, but hazarded one anyway. “The Shadows.” Frowning, she added, “What does happen if more than one person holds a true name?”

“It depends,” Tiamaris replied. He glanced at Sanabalis, and Kaylin could almost see him passing the question off.

Sanabalis ran a hand through the long strands of thin beard. “It would depend. Let us assume that you speak of only two entities: yourself, in this case, and the Shadow. If you have opposing goals—and again, we will assume for the sake of simplification, that this is true—you will exert the force of your will upon the name.

“The name will not break; it is not a physical object. But the man will be pulled in two directions. The best that can be achieved in that case is that he will be rendered immobile and will do nothing.”

“And the worst?”

“You sleep. You are easily distracted. You are not accustomed to enforcing your will and your desire upon others. I do not believe any of these three things can be said of your enemy. Kill him, if it is possible for you to do so; leave him, if it is not. If he follows you now—and I believe he will—there is no guarantee that he will not turn upon you, or upon any of us, the moment your will flags.

“And he will be dangerous then. The power that he can easily reach will be lessened, but he will be able to draw it; he will be a window from the heart of the fiefs into the fief of Tiamaris, and we are already undermined by some Shadow we cannot yet locate.”

She turned back to Maggaron. He smiled. It was not a happy smile, but unlike most smiles one saw in the fiefs, it wasn’t cruel, either. Bending at the knee, he retrieved the sword that had fallen between them. “Chosen,” he said. “Learn to speak the tongue of the People. Ask Mejrah what the Ascendants are, and how they are born.

“If I understood the Dragon Lord correctly, you bear a name much like mine, but you are, like the People, a thing of flesh and mortality. Take this. It will serve you well in your coming war.”

She looked at the runed sword in his hand. It was no longer the greatsword of a giant; it had lost that form and shape when he had lost the same. But at its size it was still something even Severn would have difficulty wielding with any grace; it was a weapon of brute force.

“Take it, Chosen. Take it, or it will serve me, as it has done.”

She shook her head. “I can’t—”

But Mejrah shouted in her ear loudly enough that her teeth were rattling by the end of it. She didn’t need to understand the language of the People to understand exactly what the old woman’s demands were. She wanted Kaylin to take the sword. Kaylin’s sword training was such that she was competent; she doubted she would ever be good.

And she didn’t doubt, looking at the blade whose runes still glowed, that good was what this sword deserved. But she lifted her hand, and Maggaron placed the sword across her palm hard enough that the blade bit the skin of the single hand she’d lifted; the second was occupied. She wasn’t willing to release him yet, and she therefore kept her hand around his name.

He shuddered once as the sword left him, and then took a step back.

Mejrah shouted at him.

Tiamaris, however, roared at Mejrah, and the old woman stilled. She didn’t, however, shut up; instead, she lowered her voice and spoke quietly to Kaylin. Quiet didn’t have the force of imperative behind it. “What is she saying?” she asked Maggaron. She couldn’t focus clearly enough to pick up the language again.

His smile was slow and sweet around the edges; it was also sad. He shook his head. “Go with her, Chosen.”

“Maggaron—”

“She wishes you to bring me to the People here. I cannot take that risk.”

“You can’t destroy yourself.”

“No. But…the Shadows have less purchase here, and I do not think they will send me to the outlands again.” He bowed. “I must go. Can you not hear them?”

Kaylin frowned. The rune beneath her palm was still warm, but it felt…less solid. “No,” she told him, staring at the hatches and curved strokes beneath her palm. She began to speak the word again, and it gained brilliance, as if her syllables were filling it. His brows rose, and his eyes took on that light.

“How important is this?” she asked him. “Ask Mejrah.”

Mejrah replied almost before he’d finished the sentence.

“She says it is very important, Chosen.”

Kaylin nodded. “Tiamaris!”

The Dragon rumbled, his language as unintelligible for the moment as Mejrah’s. “He’s been to the heart of the Shadows; he knows something about them that we don’t—or can’t—know safely. I think it’s worth taking the risk—but it’s not my fief.”

“Good of you to remember,” the Dragon Lord replied. She couldn’t see what he did next, but she heard steps, and Sanabalis entered her peripheral vision. “How strong is your hold?”

“I don’t know, Sanabalis. I haven’t fought many wars inside a living person before.”

“If you aren’t careful, you’ll cut your hand in half,” he observed. He walked past her until he stood like the third point of a very tight triangle, the other two of which were Kaylin and Maggaron. “I am aware of your dislike for magic,” he told her calmly. “Unfortunately, some magic is now required.”

She nodded. While she couldn’t hear what Maggaron clearly could, she could feel it beneath her hand; the texture of the rune was shifting and changing. Not the word itself—the parts didn’t bend, split, or fold. But it was, once again, losing solidity. She knew that when it became permeable enough, he’d be gone.

Sanabalis had given her warning. As usual, he had mastered the art of understatement. If she’d plastered her entire body—both sides, bottom of feet and top of head—against the most extreme door ward in the Imperial Palace, it would have tickled in comparison. She bit something—her tongue, her lip—and her mouth filled with the familiar and unpleasant salt of her own blood.

It was followed by the worst Leontine phrase she knew; it was all she could do not to drop the sword and the damn name simultaneously.

Sanabalis didn’t seem to be particularly concerned—at least not with her. But he studied Maggaron’s face, and as he did, Maggaron’s eyes began to shift colors in a rapid cycle. She’d never seen anything like it before, and had she, she would have immediately assumed the person possessing those eyes was dangerously insane. But Maggaron’s expression didn’t change at all; he continued to stare at Kaylin. It was very disturbing.

“Sanabalis,” she said, forcing the syllables through gritted teeth, “is this entirely necessary?”

“It is.”

“Will-it-be-over-soon?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t even ask him what he was doing because his answer might have prolonged the casting. But her eyes began to water, and her vision began to blur; she saw two or three of Maggaron begin to separate as she watched. The blood in her mouth did not help. People began to speak—shout, cry, babble, and hiss—in a way that destroyed the actual weight of syllables. She bent slightly into her knees to brace herself, and then bent slightly more, because if her legs were too stiff she’d probably topple, and folding usually left fewer bruises.

She could barely see Maggaron now; she could see—and feel—his name, and she clung to that, tightening her fingers into rigid claws. Unfortunately for Kaylin, her suspicion that the sensation of hand-on-rune was a metaphor that didn’t actually involve her real hands was proved correct. It didn’t hold her up.

Nothing did; she felt as if she were walking—slowly—through the portal in Castle Nightshade. Or rather, that Sanabalis had uprooted said portal and had dropped it, in one go, on her head.

Kaylin. The single word was cool and clear, and none of its syllables—all two—clashed with anything else. Even given the source, it was a relief.

Nightshade?

Where are you? In Tiamaris.

You are not in Tiamaris, was his edged reply.

I am—she stopped. I’m less than ten yards from the border of the fief.

Return to the fief. Now.

So much for relief. We have a bit of a situation here, she said as tersely as she could, given that she wasn’t actually speaking any of this aloud. I’m leaving the heartland as soon as Sanabalis stops—

Stops what?

Whatever the bleeding hells he’s doing.

What is he doing? Kaylin—what are you doing?

I’m falling over.

Nightshade had never had a sense of humor. He did, however, have a temper. He also had the universal condescending arrogance of the Immortal everywhere. She felt his frustration and his annoyance.

Tell Lord Sanabalis to stop whatever it is he’s doing. Tell him to stop now. There is a danger.

She couldn’t even see Sanabalis by this point, and what she’d had of breakfast was threatening to revolt; telling a Dragon Lord—even one as tolerant as Sanabalis—what to do was so far out of the question it hadn’t even occurred as a possibility. The frosty and furious arrogance of the Barrani wasn’t Kaylin’s by birth or inclination.

She started to think as much—saying it was beyond her—but the flow of defensive thought was interrupted by something a lot less pleasant: thunder and the flash of something that looked like black lightning.

She heard Nightshade curse, and she understood the meaning. The syllables themselves were—or would have been in any other circumstance—a delight of discovery because they were Barrani, and Barrani, to her knowledge, didn’t have curse words. But delight at that discovery was swamped by the sudden certainty that the danger that Nightshade feared was about to arrive.

On the heels of Nightshade’s sharp word, she felt the pain and the disorientation recede in a rush, as if someone had pulled the plug. That someone was Sanabalis. As the pain and the visual distortion fled, she felt two things: the physical, full-body trembling that was often the result of portal crossing, and the hair-raising, sharp pain that was also the result of strong magic in such proximity.

Her hand was somehow still clasped around the broadest of strokes that comprised Maggaron’s name and she blinked rapidly as his multiple wavering images coalesced into a single shape again. She turned, still holding his name, and also holding the sword he had handed into her keeping by the blade, which would have caused any number of sword experts to deafen her in their rush to have her handle it properly. Since it had, in fact, cut her palm, she didn’t require this. She set the blade on the ground, and picked it up again by its hilt.

It was, of course, in her off-hand, but at this point, it didn’t matter; the hair on the back of her neck was rigid. She was afraid to release Maggaron’s name, and that fear was just a bit stronger than her fear of being unarmed. Adjusting the sword, she turned. Oddly enough, her grip on the name itself didn’t change at all, even though Maggaron was now behind her. She could see the word; she couldn’t see him. This meant something. She wasn’t certain what.

At the moment, it didn’t matter. She could see a black, amorphous cloud rising—coalescing—in the not-far-enough distance; it was the source of the dark lightning.

Tiamaris roared a warning in all-out Dragon, and Sanabalis roared back. Before Kaylin could speak—or react—at all, Sanabalis lifted her with ease and leaped toward the border, where Tiamaris and Tara were standing. The People had pulled back, and huddled more or less behind them. Kaylin noted that Sanabalis had also picked up Mejrah, who was, in theory, too large and cumbersome to be tossed around like a sack of potatoes.

Maggaron, however, didn’t move. Kaylin tried to shout his name, and then, remembering what she held, thought it instead. Maggaron.

No, Chosen.

She cursed him in every language she could—which now included Barrani. Maggaron, cross the border, damn you.

It is not safe, Chosen—

It’s not safe to stand there—you don’t understand what that is.

Of all unexpected things, he laughed. It was a wild roar, just slightly quieter than the Dragons’ normal speaking voices would have been. “I?” he shouted. “I do not understand what that is?” He swept an arm toward the approaching cloud; as Kaylin watched it, she saw that it was eating the ground it passed over.

His laughter grew wilder, and she heard pain break free of amusement. “It is the Shadowstorm, Chosen. What do you think I was born for? What do you think the Ascendants are?”

Crazy. She didn’t say the word. And then cursed as his laughter deepened. We don’t have time for this.

You cannot take the risk of—

Yes, damn it, I can. She took a deep breath as Sanabalis deposited her more or less on her feet beside the Avatar of the Tower. Tara was glowing. The whole of her form—winged, an echo of Aerians—was made of shining alabaster. But stone or not, she moved; Tiamaris didn’t.

“Tara,” he said, speaking in sharp Elantran, “do not risk too much.”

“It is a test,” was the cool reply, “of the boundaries and the area over which my responsibility lies. Kaylin,” she added in a tone of voice that no friendly, itinerant gardener should have been able to use, “bring your follower across the border.”

“I’m trying. He’s afraid that the Shadow—”

“I am the Tower. I am the border. Bring him; the responsibility will be on my head.”

On her head, Kaylin thought, but if she failed—if Maggaron was right—it would be writ in the bodies of the People and the humans who still lived in the fief of Tiamaris. She was willing to take that risk; she’d already attempted to call Maggaron. At Nightshade’s insistence she had done that before—to him—and she had felt his counter.

No; it wasn’t the same. She had called. She hadn’t commanded.

She’d never truly attempted to impose her will on Maggaron in a way that she didn’t try to force it on anyone else in her life—by shouting, pleading, swearing, cajoling, even demanding. What the name gave her meant that she could do more.

Would she? If he stood in the streets in the path of a storm that could—if the Dragons were right—literally unmake, re-make, or worse—everything that he was, could she force him to do what she desired?

Maggaron!

He didn’t, and wouldn’t, move. Everyone was shouting now. Mejrah, in Kaylin’s ear, as if volume could compensate for lack of comprehension. Tiamaris was roaring, and if it wasn’t in her ear, he was less than ten feet away, so it had the same effect.

Swallowing air and strengthening resolve, Kaylin looked at Maggaron, and his name flashed like lightning or gold. Yes, she thought grimly. Yes, I would. He had given her the ability.

His folly gave her the right. She called his name as if his name were part of her, and she pulled him, focusing all her will on the simple act of motion: his.

It hurt her. It hurt, and she almost stopped. But Maggaron had moved, taking drunken steps toward Kaylin—and, more important, away from the moving cloud.

She heard Nightshade’s chuckle as she hesitated. Do you think that power is taken—or practiced—free of cost, little one?

Since the answer was more or less yes, and since he now already knew it, she didn’t reply. Instead, she looked at Maggaron and said, Don’t make me do this. Please.

She could see his eyes so clearly they might have been inches from her face. If you cannot do even this, Chosen, how will you protect them from me, should the time come?

Damn you, she thought, hating him for testing her this way. Damn it, if it comes down to their lives, I can. But this isn’t their lives—it’s yours. Maggaron, please.

She felt his laughter; it was sharp and unkind. But he wasn’t wholly unkind; he did as she all but begged. He walked—quickly—toward where she now stood, his name in her hand. She grimaced, and then, as if letting go of a security blanket, she removed her hand from the rune; it remained in her vision, something Nightshade’s name had never done.

Kaylin, Nightshade said. He, too, was laughing. You are far too weak for the power you have been granted. But you will learn.

The first thing Tiamaris did was order a retreat from the edge of the border. Everyone obeyed—and given he spoke Dragon, Kaylin was surprised that the People understood his command. Then again, she didn’t understand Dragon, either, and she had. Severn was waiting—always, and in his usual grim silence.

But Severn wasn’t looking at Maggaron, although the rest of the People sure as hells were. He was looking at Kaylin. More accurately, he was looking at the sword in her hand. She glanced at it, and her gaze stuck. It had changed shape. The blade was shorter—not long-knife short, but short-sword short; the hilt was practical and almost unadorned. It was straight and it looked—to her eyes—like a normal weapon, except for the obvious runes along the flat.

Her first thought was, I broke it.

Her second thought was, on the other hand, Maggaron. He was watching her, his eyes a flat shade between blue and brown. “Your enemies will not hesitate to do what you could not do.”

“If I have to do it, I’ll do it.”

To say he looked dubious was an understatement. She started to speak, and stopped as Tara touched her shoulder.

“Kaylin,” the Avatar said. “Come.”

“Where?”

In answer, Tara led her to the edge of the border, which had once again become an invisible, theoretical line across the ground. The storm that she had seen so clearly was still moving, and it moved toward where the People had gathered. Kaylin tried to see not the cloud itself, but what its passage left behind; she couldn’t. The billowing darkness was too dense.

“What are you doing?” she asked Tara.

“Containing the storm,” was the reply. “There is a reason that the Shadowstorms do not leave the fiefs.”

“Wait—are you always aware of the storms?”

“No. Not always. But even were I not sensitive to their proximity, I could hardly fail to notice this one.” She lifted her arms. Her wings spread and their tips rose, framing her. They also almost knocked Kaylin off her feet.

“Watch,” Tara said as Kaylin adjusted both her stance and her distance.

“Watch what?”

“The storm. I do not see as you see, Chosen. I see as a Tower sees. Watch. My Lord watches, as well.”

“Not at a very safe distance.”

“He is behind the border. The storm will not pass me.”

CHAPTER 6

The storm drew closer. Kaylin took an involuntary step back, and felt Severn’s hand on her shoulder, steadying her. She smiled; he couldn’t see it, but it didn’t matter; he could feel the hand she lifted and placed over his. The clouds were thick and as they approached, the darkness revealed itself as a gray-green haze. They looked like thunderclouds to Kaylin, although she’d never seen them this close before.

But thunderclouds moving at a distance were impersonal; only the lightning they shed was a danger. These clouds, similar in color, contained a more immediate threat. She had seen the Devourer as a void or a spreading darkness; she saw these clouds as something entirely different. Their moving folds hinted at shapes—both familiar and new—breaking and distorting them before Kaylin could fully catch or name them.

She heard Dragon conversation, but at a remove, as if it were thunder.

Which was strange. She realized this storm and its clouds were silent. Shapes continued to unfurl as they approached Tara, blocking out sunlight and shadowing her white visage. White, pale, it was as giving as stone.

Stone could tell a story if one understood its cracks and the way it wore over time. But this stone was new. Kaylin thought, watching Tara, that it hadn’t yet been tested. Or maybe it had, and it had faltered once. As if she could hear the thought, Tara tensed and her wings flexed.

The clouds hit then.

All sense that they had anything in common with the storms that occasionally covered the city skies vanished; they battered the air above and in front of the Avatar, stretching and thinning as they did. Stretched and thin, they were blacker, darker; they lost the tantalizing hint of moving forms, and for a moment, became two large hands, fingers pressed and curved against nothing.

The storm roared, as if it were a disembodied dragon; there was both agony and fury in the sound. Through it all, Tara stood like a wall, lifting her chin as she gazed into its heart in defiance.

The heart of the storm gazed back. Kaylin could see its eyes, disembodied but visceral, present. She could see a mouth, made of dense shadow, forming words that she couldn’t understand but could almost see.

Tara’s response was clearer; it was more solid. Seen more than heard, runes filled the space between the two: Tower and destroyer. The ground beneath the Tower’s feet shifted, cobbles melting and reforming over and over again as the storm sought purchase and Tara defied it. Denied ground, it rose, warping the heavens. Above the storm the sky became what opals might have been if they had been truly repulsive. And cold.

Lightning sheared stone, but this lightning, from that sky, wasn’t a flash of white: it was a lance of many colors and those colors bled, like chaos, into the ground itself, defining the hard line of the border in a way that nothing else had. Where the Tower’s Avatar stood, the known, the reliable, held sway; where the storm raged, nothing did.

Kaylin looked toward Sanabalis, who hadn’t yet gone Dragon, although his eyes were almost red, and his nostrils—in human form—were flared. He’d also managed to singe his beard, something she’d’ve bet was impossible. “Sanabalis, is this—”

He lifted a hand, swatting her words to one side. Given the color of his eyes, she let them go, and turned, reluctantly, back to the storm. It was screaming.

Severn caught her wrist and yanked her around, stepping to the side to avoid the flailing edge of the sword she hadn’t dropped. He pulled her into his arms, her back to his chest, and held her tightly, lowering his jaw until it rested close to her right ear. She knew he was speaking. But she felt his words as a tickle of breath and a sensation; she couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the storm itself.

The storm and her own answering cries.

She wanted to run to it. To run into it. Hadn’t she done that once, already? Maybe this time, maybe this time, she could travel back to the night that Steffi and Jade had died. And this time, she would be armed. This time she wasn’t thirteen. This time she knew what would happen. She could change it. She could unmake it. She could do what she’d failed to do then.

She swallowed her screams, opened her eyes, forced herself to look.

Why doesn’t it affect you the same way? she asked Severn in the silence and privacy she almost never used.

I’m not you. She felt his smile. It’s almost passed, he added, and she opened eyes that she hadn’t realized she’d closed. The sky was still the wrong color above the angry mass of darkness, but the darkness itself was dissipating, and its screams had faded into attenuated cries that still broke the heart.

She preferred multi-eyed demonic heads with obsidian claws and mouths in their butt ends.

“When will the sky return to normal?” she asked as Severn released her almost reluctantly and stepped back.

“Normal?” Tara lifted her head, her eyes narrowing briefly. “Ah. Not, I think, anytime soon. It is…a statement, Kaylin.”

“Of what?”

“The sky is…off limits? Is that you how say it?”

Kaylin nodded.

“The sky is off limits for my Lord, should he choose to attempt to cross the border in that fashion.”

“What will happen to him if he does?”

“No one can say. But we can be certain that something will.”

Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “The Shadows aren’t fond of the storm, either.”

Tara frowned, and then inclined her head, lowering her wings and folding them across her back. Silence descended, and as it did, the wings folded themselves into the shades of brown that were the Avatar’s gardening clothing. It was a surprisingly effective indication that the conflict—and its inherent danger—was over. “No,” she told Kaylin, her gaze still fixed at a point beyond her own borders, “they are not.”

“Then you don’t know for certain what might happen.”

“No. We know only that there is change, and it is neither predictable nor, in the end, desired by those who have been changed. Our history is…incomplete.”

“But I came to you, at your awakening.”

“Yes.” Tara still spoke in a voice better suited to the height of cold stone fortification than the gardening clothes she wore.

“And I came through the storm.”

“No.”

“But Tiamaris called it—”

“He was incorrect.”

“Does he know he was wrong?”

“Yes. The borders and their defense are the reason I was…born. They are not, however, the sole reason I was reborn. I want this life,” she added, and as she did, her voice softened, and her eyes lost the hard flint of steel. She now looked exhausted. “We’ve discussed this at length. My Lord felt that the storm—that what he had identified as storm—had not only proved fortuitous, but, in some fashion, benevolent.”

This stretched Kaylin’s strict definition of benevolent, although she couldn’t argue with the eventual outcome.

“He thus argued that the storms themselves ultimately had some greater purpose, and that some faith or trust might be placed in them. He is willing to risk much,” she added, voice soft, expression pensive. Then she shook herself, reminding Kaylin very much of one of the women who worked three days a week in the office as she did—which wasn’t generally something she thought of when she thought of ancient, god-touched edifices.

“You know it wasn’t a storm.”

“Yes.”

“But in shape—”

“And in look, yes. There were reasons that my Lord made his assumption, Kaylin. This,” she said, pointing to the now empty and still air in front of her, “was a storm. Can you see the difference?”

The urge to be humorous came and went. “Yes,” Kaylin replied. She did so slowly enough that Tara raised a single impatient brow. “The first storm we encountered had no voice.”

“Voice?”

“You couldn’t hear this one? It was screaming, Tara.”

“I told you, Chosen; I do not perceive Shadow the way you perceive it.” Her eyes closed for a few seconds. “Nor does my Lord.”

Morse joined Tara. The former fieflord’s lieutenant had taken one new gash across her forearm, which had destroyed padding but had managed to break very little skin.

“So,” Kaylin asked her, “this happen often?”

“Every other day.”

Tara frowned. “Morse, it doesn’t happen every other—”

“Figure of speech,” Morse broke in quickly. Kaylin stifled even the hint of a smile. “Believe it or not, it’s better than it was before the fieflord.”

“The—oh, you mean Tiamaris.”

“I don’t mean Barren.” Morse spit.

Tara watched her covertly, as if fascinated by the gesture, and then turned back to Kaylin.

“I understood what Morse meant,” Kaylin said quickly. “These border attacks happen frequently.” She glanced at the People.

Tara frowned. “Illien is still within my Tower, as my Lord’s guest. I remember Illien, and I remember the feel of the borders of his domain before…I could no longer sense them. You can cross the border,” she added. “And at the moment, it is safe; the storm has driven the Shadows from them, and they will return slowly, if at all today. I do not think you will notice the difference, if you travel farther up the road; the road here has been destroyed by the storm, and it will be a while before it once again looks like the other half of a street, at least to mortal vision.”

“It’ll—it’ll go back to what it once was?”

“Yes.”

“The fief’s streets didn’t. And the buildings that were half consumed or transformed by Shadows—those didn’t, either.”

“No. That is one of the differences between the Shadowlands and your own. Your lands—my Lord’s lands—are solid; they exist.

“The Shadowlands are more malleable; they do not take scars in the same way. Where Shadows are strong, the landscape on that side of the border will respond to the weight of its call, the force of its power. The buildings will shift and change, growing or sinking or fading; the streets will become molten pools or gaping pits. But when the Shadow passes, so does the changes it made. “Were I to likewise make such drastic changes in the geography of my fief, when the battle was over, what would remain would be those destroyed buildings, the molten rock, and the fissures.”

“Can I ask how you know this?”

Tara raised a brow. “The knowledge was built into me,” she finally replied. “And when I close my eyes, I can see the dim and faded image of ancient battles; I can hear their attenuated battle cries.” She smiled then, and it was an almost bitter smile. “I am not what you are, Kaylin. Why do you need to know?”

Kaylin shook her head. “I want to know—which is different from need—because it’s always a good idea to have as much knowledge of your enemy as possible. It’d be better if any of it made any sense.” Saying this, she lifted the sword that was still, against all odds, in her hands. “Take this, for instance. I would swear it was a greatsword meant for a giant when I first laid eyes on it.”

Tara said nothing.

“…please don’t tell me you recognize this weapon.”

“I do not recognize the weapon,” was the Tower’s reply. It was evasive, and honestly? While Tara had learned many things about interacting with people, she wasn’t actually good at some of them. Which, given she could take you apart and find her way—with ease—to the darkest and most painful of your memories, said something. Kaylin, at this moment, wasn’t sure what.

“What do the runes on the blade say?”

“Runes?” The Tower frowned. Glancing at Tiamaris, who was now waiting, wings folded, in the still streets, she said, “My Lord, I believe the danger has passed for the moment. May we retire?”

His eyes shifted color. “You are injured?”

“No! No. But the storms are tiring.”

“I will remain. Morse!”

Morse nodded. It wouldn’t pass muster as respectful anywhere but the fiefs, but since that’s where they were standing, it worked. “You want me to keep watch on the construction?”

“The People are here. Escort the Lady home.”

Tara pointed at Maggaron, and Tiamaris’s brows constricted; they were silent for a long moment, but at length, he nodded.

The Lady’s escort was not confined to Morse; Kaylin and Severn traveled with her, at her request, Maggaron walking to their left in subdued silence. Subdued or no, he still wore armor, and he was still eight feet–plus in height; he cleared streets just by existing.

Lord Sanabalis, however, remained—in human form—at the side of his former student. His gaze flickered rapidly over the sword in Kaylin’s hands, but he chose not to say a word. Loudly, and with an expression that implied that all the words he held in abeyance would be put to better use later.

The border streets grew smaller as they walked, and the streets themselves were, not surprisingly, empty of anyone that wasn’t about eight feet tall. Even the children of the new arrivals remained out of sight. Morse, in the absence of Tiamaris, relaxed. She didn’t so much walk as move while slouching.

“So. This happens a lot?” Kaylin asked, picking up the strands of their previous conversation, if it could be called that.

“Not the storm. But the Shadows have gone nuts in the last couple of days.”

“Since the People arrived?”

“The giants?”

“Is that what they’re called hereabouts?”

“Nah. We call them the Norannir.”

“Why?”

“It’s what they call themselves.” Morse grinned. “It’s more or less what they call anyone who isn’t a Shadow, and we adopted it. The other Imperial guy—”

“Sanabalis.” When Severn cleared his throat, Kaylin added, “Lord Sanabalis.”

“He’s attempting to learn some of their language, and attempting to at least teach their kids some of ours. The kids pick it up faster.”

“What else have the Norannir been doing?”

“Anything. I mean anything they’re asked to do, if we can make it clear. But…they’re not afraid of the Shadow. They hate it, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t fear it. They don’t fear the Ferals, either; they make camp beside the damn border, and they watch.” She grimaced. “Truth is, they make the streets safer just by living there.

“But our people? They’re fuckin’ mice. They scatter at the sight of the Norannir.”

“Big surprise. They were generally smart enough to scatter at the sight of you, and you weren’t eight feet tall and wielding an ax they probably couldn’t lift on a good day.”

Morse was willing to concede this, but only barely. “I wanted them to be afraid. I was a threat. Avoiding me? Made sense. But avoiding the Norannir makes none.”

Clearly, life in Tiamaris—the fief, not the Dragon—agreed with Morse; she’d never cared much whether people made sense before.

“They’ll stay if the Lady’s with them, though. They love her more than they fear the Norannir.”

“We can probably work with that.”

Tara, who had been walking in silence toward the Tower—with the odd stop to look at dirt or grass—turned to look at Kaylin. She raised a brow to make clear she’d heard the words and wanted details. “The Norannir are going to be living in the fief. They may make their way out in ones and twos—I did, Severn did—but this is where most of them are going to stay. The rest of the People who already live here don’t have much choice, and even if they thought they did, they wouldn’t say anything.

“But they trust you now.” In truth, it had taken much, much less time for that trust to build than Kaylin would have guessed. “If they trust you enough that they’re willing to risk their lives in the presence of the strangers, we can work with that. We can make the strangers seem less, well, strange.”

“How?” Morse demanded.

“I don’t know how much time Tara has, but…these language lessons. Sanabalis has a good idea once in a while; he’s trying to teach the kids. What if we do it in the other direction?”

“What?”

“We teach the human kids the Norannir language. Tara can be there to help. It doesn’t have to be much, and it doesn’t have to be useful right away. But the kids’ll spend time with the Norannir, and anything that doesn’t terrify kids…”

“Who’s going to volunteer their kids?”

Kaylin said, “I don’t know. But we won’t be the ones asking—Tara will. Besides, not all the kids have living parents. Offer them a meal and they’ll come.” Morse nodded and they both looked at Tara.

Tara, however, looked ahead to the Tower. “Come,” she said quietly. “You asked me about the sword.”

“You said you didn’t—”

“I don’t. I don’t, but I can—in the words of the fief—guess.”

The Tower doors still boasted no door wards, and this, more than anything else, made it instantly feel like home. Or as much a home as a rising pillar of white stone, surrounded by carrot, beet, and potato gardens could ever be. The doors rolled inward as Tara approached them, but many, many of the fancier buildings in the City had doors that did that, as well. Here, she bowed to Maggaron.

“You will be safe within,” she told him.

“What I see—”

“You will be safe. You cannot harm me. And if I do not wish you to leave, you will remain within the Tower for the rest of your natural existence.”

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