Praise for
MICHELLE
SAGARA

and The Chronicles of Elantra series

Cast in Shadow

“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

“Intense, fast-paced, intriguing, compelling

and hard to put down … unforgettable.”

—In the Library Reviews

Cast in Courtlight “Readers will embrace this compelling, strong-willed heroine with her often sarcastic voice.” —Publishers Weekly

“A fast-paced novel, packed with action and adventure …

integrating the conventions of police procedurals

with more fantastic elements.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Cast in Secret “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

“Remarkable …. Filled with time-release plot threads and

intricate details, these books are both mesmerizing

and unforgettable. If you’re a fan of rich fantasy,

this is the series for you!”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Top Pick (4½ stars)

About the Author

MICHELLE SAGARA has written fourteen novels since 1991, when her fi rst book,Into the Dark Lands, was published. She’s written a quarterly book review column for the venerable Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a number of years, as well as dozens of short stories (or novellas, to be more exact).

In 1986 she started working in an SF specialty bookstore, where she continues to work to this day. She loves reading, is allergic to cats (very, which means they crawl all over her), is happily married, has two lovely children, and has spent all of her life in her native Toronto—none of it on Bay Street

She started reading fantasy almost as soon as she could read, and fell instantly in love with Narnia; her next fantasy discovery was Patricia McKillip’s Forgotten Beasts of Eld. She moved on to The Hobbit, which led to her discovery of the life-changingThe Lord of the Rings.

Her greatest hope for her writing is that someone will read it and be moved by the same sense of magic and mystery that she fi nds in the books she loves.

She will talk about writing, bookselling and books forever if given a chance. You’ve been warned.

Cast in

Secret

Michelle

Sagara

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AUTHOR NOTE

I always wonder at people who tell other people to get a life, because, for all accounts and purposes, I have one. It’s a good life, but there are times when it’s overwhelming, and at times like that I seek a little bit of escape, and a little bit of something that’s larger. I find it in different places—I adored Buffy, especially the first two seasons, adored beyond reason Firefly, read novels, manga and play video games.

I do all these things because they entertain me, and when I decided to write THE CHRONICLES OF ELANTRA books, I wanted to return some of that entertainment, to capture some of its essence. It was a bit of a departure for me—the stories are structured a little bit more like the beloved television shows mentioned above; each volume has some hint of a larger arc, but should be self-contained in the events. I went for a modern sensibility, because the world itself is strange enough. I wanted to be able to make other people laugh, or to move them, because that’s what I want when I seek escape.

Cast in Shadow introduced Kaylin Neya, a young officer of the Law who’s still trying to sort out who she is and where she fits in. Cast in Courtlight threw her headfirst into politics, which is not one of her strengths. In Cast in Secret, I wanted to reintroduce the Tha’alani—the City’s native telepaths. They keep to themselves as much as possible because most of the citizens of Elantra fear and shun them—after all, how many of us want to be surrounded by people who can, at will, examine all our petty or ugly truths?

Kaylin certainly doesn’t. But in Cast in Secret, she has no choice, and I hope the consequences of that lack of choice give back some of what I’ve found in books, manga, anime and movies through the years.

In October, don’t forget to look for Cast in Fury, which deals with the aftermath of this story—and more about the Tha’alani!

This one is for my kids—and peers—

in Makaveli, on Shadowsong

/bonk

/hug

/love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My long-suffering husband, Thomas,

kept home, household and the peculiar space

authors often need safe, as always, but also

found time to read the work in progress, even

when the progress was agonizingly slow. My

parents, Ken and Tami; my children, Daniel

and Ross; John and Kristen Chew and their

children, Jamie and Liam, kept my house

lively. Terry Pearson read this in all stages,

and offered the usual commentary, and the

incentive to keep going.

Mary-Theresa Hussey proved saintly in her

patience, and invaluable in the way editors are

when the author is still too much in the book to see it as a book. (And Adam Wilson sent helpful and cheerful reminders, which were, as it turns out, entirely necessary.)

CHAPTER
1

Private Kaylin Neya studied the duty roster, and given how little she studied anything that wasn’t somehow involved with a corpse, this said something.

The official roster was like a dartboard, except that people threw pencils at it instead. Sometimes they hit a bull’s-eye anyway. Lined up in columns by day, and color-coded for the more moronic—or hungover—by district, it told the various members of the branch of law enforcement known as the Hawks where, exactly, they were meant to either find trouble or stay out of it. Kaylin could easily make out her name, although some clod with lousy aim had managed to make a giant hole in it.

If it was true that the roster could never make everyone happy, it was somehow also true that it could make everyone unhappy. Sergeant Marcus Kassan, in charge of assigning duties on a monthly basis, had a strong sense of fairness; if someone was going to suffer, everyone might as well keep them company.

As the Hawks’ only Leontine officer—in fact, the only Leontine to be an officer of the Halls of Law—he presided over the men and women under his command with a hooded set of fangs in a face that was fur, large eyes and peaked ears—in that order. He also boasted a set of claws that made daggers superfluous and did a good job against swords, as well.

Kaylin had no pencil with which to puncture the paper, or she’d have thrown more at it than liberal curses.

Swearing at one’s assignment wasn’t unusual in the office; as far as office pastimes went, it was one that most of the Hawks indulged in. Kaylin’s partner, Corporal Severn Handred, looked easily over her shoulder, but waited until she turned to raise a dark brow in her general direction. That brow was bisected by a slender, white line, a scar that didn’t so much mar his face as hint at secret histories.

Secret, at least, to Kaylin; she hadn’t seen him take that one.

“What will you be missing?” he asked, when her impressive spate of cursing—in four official languages—had died down enough that he could be heard without shouting. Severn rarely raised his voice.

“Game,” she said curtly. “Ball,” she added.

“Playing?”

She grimaced. “Betting.” Which, for Kaylin, was synonymous with watching.

“Figures. Who were you betting on?”

She shrugged. “Sharks.”

“So you’ll save some money.”

This caused an entirely different spate of swearing, and she punctuated this by punching his shoulder, which he thoughtfully turned in her direction. “You’d be betting on the Tigers, I suppose?”

“Already have,” he replied. “Our shift?” He glanced at the window. It told the time. Literally. Mages had been allowed to go mad when they’d been asked to encourage punctuality, and it showed. The urge to tell the window to shut the hell up came and went several times a day.

The fact that mages had been allowed to perform the spell or series of spells seemed almost a direct criticism of Kaylin, who wasn’t exactly punctual on the best of days.

“Private Neya and Corporal Handred, report to the Quartermaster before active duty.” Some sweet young voice had been used to capture the words. Kaylin seriously wanted to meet the person behind it. And was pretty sure the person behind it seriously didn’t want to meet her.

“Quartermaster?” Severn said, with the barest hint of a sympathetic grimace.

Kaylin said, “Can I break the window first?”

“Won’t help. He’s probably responsible for having the glass replaced, and you’re in enough trouble with him as is.”

It was true. She had barely managed to crawl up the ladder from thing-scraped-off-the-bottom-of-a-shoe-after-a-dog-fight in the unspoken ranks the Quartermaster gave the Hawks; she was now merely in the person-I-can’t-see category, which was a distinct improvement, although it usually meant she was the last to get kitted out. The Quartermaster was officious enough, however, to make last and late two entirely different domains—if only, in Kaylin’s case, by seconds.

“It was just a stupid dress,” she muttered. “One dress, and I’m in the doghouse.”

“I doubt it. You know how much he loves those dogs.”

“Yeah. A lot more than he likes the rest of us.”

“It was an expensive dress, Kaylin.”

“I didn’t choose it!”

“No. But you did give it back with a few bloodstains, a dozen knife tears, and about a pound less fabric.”

“It’s not like it could have been used by anyone else—”

“Not in that condition, no. And,” he added, lifting a hand, “I’m not the Quartermaster, I didn’t have to haggle with the Seamstresses Guild, and I don’t really care.”

“Yeah, but his life doesn’t depend on me, so he doesn’t have to listen to me whine.”

Severn chuckled. “No. Your career depends on him, however. Good job, Kaylin.”

They walked down the long hall that led to Marcus’s desk, which just happened to be situated so that it crossed almost any indoor path a Hawk could take in the line of duty. He liked to keep an eye on things. Or a claw across the throat, as the Leontine saying went.

As the Hawks’ sergeant, assignments came from him, and reports—which involved the paperwork he so hated—went to him. Caitlin, his assistant, and for all purposes, his second in command, was the one who would actually read the submissions, and she wisely chose to pass on only those that she felt were important. The rest, she fudged.

And since the Festival season was, as of two days past, officially over, most of those reports involved a lot of cleanup, a lot of official fines—which helped the coffers of the Halls of Law immensely—and a lot of petty bickering, which would be referred to the unofficial courts in the various racial enclaves for mediation.

Ceding that bickering to the racial courts, rather than the Imperial Courts, took more paperwork. But the Emperor was short on time and very, very short on patience, so only cases of real import—or those that involved the Elantran nobility—ever went to him directly. Given that he was Immortal, being a dragon and all, this struck Kaylin as unfair. After all, he had forever.

“Lord Kaylin,” Marcus said, as they approached his desk. The title, granted her by the Lord of the Barrani High Court, caused a round of snickers and an unfortunate echo in the office that set Kaylin’s teeth on edge. The deep sarcasm that only a Leontine throat could produce didn’t help much. “So good of you to join us.”

She snapped him a salute—which, given his rank didn’t demand it, was only meant to annoy—and stood at attention in front of his desk. Severn’s short sigh, she ignored; he offered Marcus neither of these gestures.

“There’s been a slight change in your beat today.”

The official roster changed at the blink of an eye. A Leontine eye, with its golden iris. “You’re to go to Elani Street,” he told them.

“What, mage central?”

“Or Charlatan central, if you prefer,” Marcus snapped back. Elani Street was both. There was the real stuff, if you weren’t naive and you knew what to look for, and then there was love potion number nine, and tell your fortune, and meet the right mate, all of which booths—usually with much finer names—saw a steady stream of traffic, day in and day out.

Kaylin was always torn between contempt for the people who had such blind dreams and contempt for the people who could exploit them so callously. Elani Street was not her favorite street, mostly because she couldn’t decide which of the two she wanted to strangle more.

She flipped an invisible coin. It landed, after a moment in the mental ether, on the side of people who made money, rather than people who lost it.

“Who’s fleecing people this time?” Kaylin muttered. “It’s only two days past Festival—you’d think people would be tired enough to give it a rest. Or,” she added darkly, “in jail.”

“Many are both,” Marcus replied, and something in his tone made her give up her sullen and almost perfect stance to lean slightly into the desk. Slightly was safe; he still hadn’t cleared half the paperwork the Festival produced annually, and knocking any of the less than meticulous piles over was—well, the furrows in the desk didn’t get there by magic.

“What’s happened?”

“There’s been a disturbance,” he replied. “I believe you know the shop. Evanton’s. You may have given him some business over the years.”

She knew the shop; she had had her knives enchanted there so that they left their sheaths without a sound. Teela had been the Hawk who had both introduced her to Evanton and also made clear to Evanton that anything he offered for money had better damn well work. Given that Teela was one of a dozen or so Barrani—also all Hawks—who had made their pledge of allegiance to the Imperial Halls of Law, her word tended to carry weight. After all, she was, like the dragon Emperor and the rest of her kind, immortal—and the Barrani loved nothing better than a grudge, at least judging by the way they held on to the damn things so tightly. Startlingly beautiful to the eye, they were cold as crackling ice to the ear, and their tall, slender bodies radiated that I-can-kill-you-before-you-can-blink confidence that was, in fact, no act.

Evanton, to his credit, had been neither offended nor frightened. In fact, his first words had been, “Yes, yes, I know the drill, Officer.” And his second: “You’re on the young side for a Hawk. So take my advice, for what it’s worth. You should pay more attention to the company you keep. People will judge you by it, mark my words.”

He generally had a lot of words he wanted marked.

Which had caused Teela to grimace. And Tain, her beat partner, to laugh.

As for the enchantment, he’d approved of it. “Most people who come here want something to make them look prettier,” he’d said, with obvious contempt. “Or younger. Or smarter. This, this is practical.”

She had never asked Evanton if he had ever belonged to the Imperial Order of Mages; there wasn’t much point. If he had, he’d managed to get out the unusual way—he wasn’t in a coffin. Although to Kaylin’s youthful eye, he looked as if he should have been. His hair was the color of blinding light off still water, and his skin was like wrinkled leather; he was almost skeletal, and his work—or so he said—demanded so much attention he was continuously bent over in a stoop. She had been certain, the first time she saw him, that he would break if she forced him to straighten up.

But still … she liked him. So she frowned. “What kind of a disturbance?”

“That, I think, is what you’re there to ascertain.” He paused. “Are you waiting for something?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Get lost.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Corporal?”

Severn nodded.

“Make sure that she understands that ‘get lost’ in this case isn’t literal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What I want to know,” Private Kaylin Neya said, not quite stomping her feet as she marched down the streets, “is why no one calls you Lord Severn.”

The corporal—which rank still annoyed Kaylin, and yes, she knew it was petty—shrugged. “Because it doesn’t bother me,” he replied.

“It didn’t bother me when the Barrani called me Lord Kaylin,” she said sourly.

He laughed. He kept an easy pace with her march, given the difference in the length of their strides, and her mood—which could charitably be described as not very good—seemed to cheer him immensely.

“What’s so funny?”

“It bothered you enough to cause you to point out that no one called Teela Lord.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “It wasn’t the Barrani,” she insisted. “But when Marcus started—”

“The entire office, you mean?”

“The entire office follows Marcus’s lead, except when he’s chewing through his desk.” Which was only partly a figurative description of an angry Leontine officer. Leontine fur, when it stood on end, was impressive; Leontine jaws, massive, boasted teeth that were easily capable of rendering most throats not quite useful for things like breathing—but most of the danger they could offer came from their massive, and usually sheathed, claws.

Marcus’s desk was a testament to how often he lost his temper.

“If you give it a few days,” Severn told her, “it’ll pass.”

She snorted. “Sanabalis started it.”

“Lord Sanabalis.”

“That’s not what I call him.”

“It is, however, what everyone else calls him, and what you’d like to call him at the moment would be … ill advised. You’re his student, he has graciously agreed to continue to tutor you, and you both know that your career depends on whether or not he decides to actually pass you.” He didn’t add that in this case career and life were the same thing. He didn’t need to. Kaylin had a magic that not even the most august of the Imperial scholars understood, and if it had been a weak magic, it wouldn’t have mattered—much. But it was strong enough to withstand the full breath of a dragon in his true form. Strong enough to make a hole in a thick stone wall that was wider across than Severn. Strong enough to heal the dying.

And the Emperor was in possession of all these facts, and more. Kaylin’s glance strayed a moment to her arms; the length of her sleeves all but hid the dark marks that were tattooed there, in whirls and strokes, as if she were parchment, and they were the scattered telling of a story that was ancient before history began.

Her powers and these marks had arrived almost at the same time, in the winter world of the fiefs, where only the desperate and the criminals lived. Funny, that the fiefs should lie so precisely at the heart of the city.

“Kaylin.”

She looked up, and realized that Severn had been speaking. Dragged her eyes from sleeves that weren’t all that interesting, anyway, and nodded.

“Lord Sanabalis might be unusual for a Dragon, but he is a Dragon.” He paused a moment, and as Kaylin realized she was losing him and pulled up short, he added, “He meant it as a gesture of respect, Kaylin.”

“I don’t need that kind of respect. And anyway, no one else means it that way.”

“Well, no. But they’re Hawks. You expected different?”

She started walking again. “What are the odds?”

“Which betting pool?”

“Mine.”

“Four days,” he said cheerfully, “before you lose your temper and try to break something over someone’s head.”

“Any bets as to whose?”

“Some.”

“Name names.”

He laughed. “I’ve got money riding on it.”

“Figures.” She almost paused at the stall of a baker who was known to be friendly to the Hawks or the Swords. Almost. The coin in her pocket would probably last her another three days if she didn’t bother with food. And less than the afternoon if she did; if the baker was friendly, she wasn’t stupid.

“If you’re betting on the Sharks,” Severn said, stopping by her side, “it’s no big surprise you’re always so broke. Good morning, Mrs. Whitmore. We’d like a half-dozen of the buns.”

Hunger versus pride wasn’t much of a struggle; she let Severn buy breakfast, because that was what it was. She’d been keeping company with the midwives the past two nights and it showed. The circles under her eyes accentuated her mood. But it was a good sort of bad—no one had died, no mothers, and no babies. And she had spent time helping to lick the fur of a sole Leontine cub clean.

She still had hair in her mouth. But she was aware of the singular honor offered her by the mother: the willingness to let a stranger near the helpless, mewling cub. It was a gesture not only of trust, but of respect, and it was also a request that Leontine women seldom made.

The mother had watched as Kaylin’s entirely inadequate human tongue had, in a ritual way, licked some of the birthing fluid from the cubling’s closed, delicately veined lids. Kaylin’s stomach was not up to the task of more, but more wasn’t required; she handled the infant with care, marveling at the fine, fine hair that covered him. It was a pale gray, with a spattering of white streaks—these would fade into the Leontine gold she best knew with time. But the birth colors were considered important to the Leontine. And these were not bad colors.

It wasn’t all that often that she was called into a Leontine birthing—because there were no Leontine midwives in the guild, and the Leontines defined the word suspicious when it came to outsiders. She had expected the birth to be difficult, and by Leontine standards, it was—but it was also unusual. There was one cub, and only one. The pregnancy, she had been very quietly told, had been labored and difficult, and it was thought—many times—that Arlan would lose the cubs.

Losing the cubs and not losing her life were not things that Kaylin would normally be consulted about. This time was different, but she wasn’t certain why, or how.

“It’s important,” an exhausted Arlan had deigned to inform her, “that I be able to bear cubs.” She did not say why, and Kaylin, seeing the almost subconscious flick of claws at the end of the pale golden fur of Arlan’s hands, had known better than to ask.

“I will name him Roshan,” his mother had said, and then added, “Roshan Kaylarr.” She’d nodded, then, to Kaylin, and Kaylin had understood that, in as much as a Leontine could be named after her, this child was.

If she had been human, this indomitable and ferocious Leontine woman, Kaylin would have asked what the father thought of the name; in the case of the Leontine males, this was pointless. They loved their kitlings—but they knew when to stay out of the way.

They had wives, plural, and the wives could fight like, well, cats when the need arose—but the pridlea was also a unit unto itself, and where husbands were concerned, they formed a wall of solidarity when it came to protecting their own.

“Kaylin?” Severn said, and she hastily swallowed a mouthful of pastry that thankfully tasted nothing like the salty skin of newborn cub. Shook her head. He backed off, but with a slight smile.

“Where are we?”

“Almost there. Pay attention?”

“I was.”

He nodded with the ease of long practice. “Pay attention to where we actually are, hmm?”

“Trouble?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“You’re going to trip over your own feet, and stone isn’t the best cushion.” He paused, and then said quietly, “And I have something for you.”

She grimaced. “The bracer?”

“It was on my breakfast table in the morning. I thought you’d been with the midwives, and I kept it for you.” He took it out of the satchel he carried by his side. It gleamed gold and sparkled with the caught light of sapphire, ruby and diamond. It was her cage.

And it was, in its fashion, her haven. This, this cold, gleaming artifact, could contain the magic that Sanabalis, the heartless bastard, was trying to teach her to control. It was the only thing that could, and without it—without its existence—she would probably be dead by Imperial order.

It had come from the personal hoard of the Emperor, and it was ancient, although it looked as if it had been newly made. It took no dents or scratches, and no blood remained across its golden surface for long. Its gems didn’t break or scratch, either.

“Put it on,” he said.

She nodded, her fingers keying the sequence that would open it. Sliding it over her wrist, she thought of making some feeble protest—but she was with Severn, not Marcus, and Severn understood.

“You think I’ll need it?” she asked softly, as it clicked shut.

“I don’t know,” he said at last, but after a pause that was evasive. “You know you’re not supposed to take it off.” As she opened her mouth, he added, “By the Hawklord’s orders.”

She bit back the words for a moment, and when they came, they came more smoothly. “You know I can’t help the midwives if I wear it.”

“I know.”

“I can’t heal—”

“I know. I told you, I thought you might have been with the midwives when I saw it this morning.”

The other property of the bracer that would have been the envy of the stupid because it looked so very expensive was that it was impossible to lose. She could take it off if need be, drop it in the nearest trash heap, and it would find its way back to its keeper—that keeper not being Kaylin. For seven years, the keeper had been the Hawklord.

And for a month now, it had been Severn. He never asked why it came to his hand—which was good, because no one, as far as Kaylin could tell, had an explanation—and he never asked, except obliquely, why it wasn’t on hers. He simply gathered it and brought it back to her. And waited.

As a Keeper, he was a lot less onerous than the Hawklord.

“Severn—”

“It’s Elani Street,” he replied with a shrug, “and if you hunt long enough, you’ll find magic here.”

“I know where to find—” But she stopped, catching her words before she tripped over them with her tongue. “I hate magic.”

He stopped walking, turned suddenly, and looked down at her from an uncomfortable height. His hands caught both of her shoulders, and slid up them, trailing the sides of her neck to cup her face, and she met his eyes, brown and simple, dark with a past that she was part of, and a past that she didn’t know at all.

“Don’t,” he told her quietly. “Don’t hate it. It’s part of what you are, now, and nothing will change that. It’s a gift.”

She thought of the ways in which she had killed in a blind fury; thought of the stone walls that had parted like curtains of dust when the magic overwhelmed her. “A gift,” she said bitterly.

And he said, “You have fur on your tongue.” In almost perfect Leontine.

And a baby’s name—did race really matter?—like an echo in the same language, waiting to be said in affection and wonder, even if she were never again there to hear it.

He let his hands fall slowly away from her face as if they had belonged there, as if they were drawn there by gravity.

“Severn—”

He touched her open mouth with a single finger. But he didn’t smile, and he didn’t say anything else.

Elani Street opened up before them like any other merchant street in the district. If you didn’t know the city, you might have mistaken it for any other merchant street. It was not in the high-rent district—Kaylin’s patrols were somehow always designed to keep her away from the rich and prosperous—but it was not in the low-rent district, either. It hovered somewhere in the center. Clearly the buildings were old, and as much wood as stone had gone into their making, but they were well kept, and if paint flaked from signboards and windows had thinned with time, they were solid and functional.

The waterfront was well away, and the merchant authority didn’t technically govern the men and women who worked here for some complicated legalistic reason that had a lot to do with history and nothing to do with the law, so the Hawks and the Swords were the sole force that policed the area. And everyone was happy that way. Except for the Merchants’ Guild, which sent on its annual weasel report in an attempt to bring Elani under its jurisdiction.

Once or twice things had gotten ugly between the Merchants’ Guild and the Elani Streeters, and blood had been shed across more than just this part of town. This was practical history, to Kaylin, so she remembered it better than the codicils on top of codicils that kept the Merchants’ Guild at bay.

They had—the Guild—even tried to set up trade sanctions against this small part of town, and while everyone in theory agreed with it, in practice, they’d come anyway, because there wasn’t any actual evidence that they’d been here. You didn’t exactly bear a brand saying Fortunes Have Been Read Across My Palm, Look Here when you left. The sale of love potions may have dropped a tad during that embargo, however.

No, the rents weren’t high here, but the take was high enough that the vendors could usually fend off the more powerful guild with effective political sleight of hand. Or so Teela said; if she admired it, it had to be underhanded.

She was, after all, Barrani.

Severn’s expression was so carefully neutral, Kaylin laughed. He raised a brow.

“You don’t like Elani Street?”

“Not much, no. You?”

She shrugged. “It’s a street.”

He stopped in front of a placard that was leaning haphazardly against a grimy window. “Love potions?” he said. The sneer was entirely in his tone. “Meet your perfect mate? Find out what your future holds?”

As she’d said more or less the same thing—well, more and more heated—she shrugged again. “It’s a living.”

“So is theft.”

“Yeah, but people come here to empty their pockets. There’s no knife at their throat.”

“Dreams are their own knife, Kaylin. Dreams, what-ifs, desires. We all have to have hope.”

“This isn’t hope,” she replied quietly. “It’s just another way of lying to yourself.”

“Almost everything is, in the end.” He glanced at the board again, and then continued to walk down the street. He walked slowly enough that she could catch up to him; on patrol he usually did. But there was distance in his expression, some thought she couldn’t read—not that he’d ever been transparent.

Still, the street itself was quiet; the Festival season had passed over and around it, and the merchants who had, enterprising hucksters all, taken stalls near the Ablayne had returned home to the nest to find it, as it so often was after festival celebrations—and the cost of those—empty.

Evanton was not above taking a stall—or so he said—but his age prevented him from doing so so close to water. It made his bones ache. Kaylin expected that it was his jaw that ached, because he had some idea of what customer service was supposed to be, and fixing a smile across lines that were worn in perpetual frown taxed his strength.

Still, she smiled when she saw his store. Touching the hilts of her daggers for both luck and memory, she walked up the three flat steps that led to his door, and frowned slightly.

“Is it late?”

“You just had breakfast. You answer.” But Severn’s frown echoed hers; the curtains were drawn. In the door’s window and also, across the shop’s wider front. Gold leaf had flecked in places, and glass was scratched atop those letters—some thief attempting to remove what was on the other side had no doubt had too much to drink that night.

She knocked. Waited a minute, counting slowly, before she knocked again; Evanton never moved quickly, and his temper soured greatly if the visitor was too stupid to realize this.

But before she could be really annoying, the curtains flipped back, and she saw a wizened face peering through glass. He didn’t look much older than he had the first time she’d met him—but then again, she doubted that was possible. The curtains fell back into place, black drape that was almost gray with sun. No stars on it, no moons, no fancy—and fake—arcane symbols.

The door opened slowly; she heard keys twisting a rusty lock, followed by creaking hinges.

“You really should get some help around here,” she muttered.

“Good help,” he said coolly, “is hard to find in this city.”

“You’ve tried?”

He grimaced. “Don’t force me to be rude, girl. You’re wearing the Hawk.”

She smiled. It wasn’t the forced smile of an officer of the law, either; she had walked back into his dusty parlor, with its long counter, its rows of shelves—a city, no doubt, for spiders—its odd books stacked here and there like so much garbage so many times she couldn’t feel uncomfortable here. If it was an odd place, it felt like someone’s home, and she was welcome in it.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Evanton added pointedly, looking up at Severn. As Evanton, bent, was about Kaylin’s height, he had to look up.

“No, sir,” Severn said, in a much politer—and cooler—voice. “But I am aware of your establishment.”

“Fame gets me every time,” the old man replied. “Who are you?”

“He’s Severn,” Kaylin answered quickly. “Corporal Handred is also—as you can see—a Hawk.”

“Aye, I can see that,” Evanton said. “I would have called him a Wolf, if you’d asked me.”

Severn raised a brow. It went half as high as Kaylin’s. “He was a Wolf—” she began, but stopped as Severn stepped neatly, and heavily, on her foot. “What do you know about the Wolves?”

“Meaning what dealings have I had with them?”

“Meaning that.”

Evanton snorted. “You haven’t spent enough time with those Barrani, girl.”

“What?”

“That’s no way to get an answer.”

“I could threaten to break your arms if you want.”

He laughed his dry, low chuckle. “Aye, but they’re more subtle than that. I’m of use to them. It’s important in this business to be of use to people.”

Severn said, quietly, “We’re here on official business.”

“Dressed like that, you’d have to be. Although the uniform suits you.”

“You sent a message to the Hawks.”

Evanton shrugged. “I? I sent no message to the Hawks. I believe a message was sent, on the other hand. I know my own business,” he said at last, “and I know Hawk business when I see it. I prefer to keep them entirely separate, you understand, but we can’t always get what we want. You’ll want to follow me,” he added.

Kaylin was already behind him, because she always was in his store; he could bite your head off for going anywhere without him, and usually at length.

He led them behind his tall, sturdy counter. Its sides were made of solid wood that had the patina of time and disregard, not craft. It was impossible to see most of the wood, it was covered by so many things. Papers, bits of cloth, needles, thread—she had never asked why he wanted those because his answers could be mocking and gruesome. It looked more as if it belonged in a bar than a store, but then again, most of the things in the store looked as if they belonged somewhere else; the only things they had in common were dust and cobwebs, and the occasional glint of something that might be gold, or steel, or captive light—a hint of magic.

Wedged between two hulking shelves that looked suspiciously unstable was a very narrow door. Evanton took out a key ring that Kaylin could have put her whole arm through without trying very hard, chose one of three keys that dangled forlornly from its thin, tarnished metal, and unlocked the door. Like everything else in the store, it creaked.

He opened it slowly—he opened everything that way—and after a moment, nodded to himself and motioned for them to follow. Kaylin started forward, and Severn, with long years of practice, managed to slide between her and Evanton so smoothly she didn’t even step on the back of his feet. And not for lack of trying.

They entered a hall that was, like everything else in the building, narrow; they could walk single file, and if anyone had tried to pull a sword here, it would have lodged in the wall or the roof if they actually had to use it. Given Evanton, this was possibly deliberate. It was hard to say where the old man was concerned.

But at the end of the hall was another door, and judging by the jangle of keys, it, too, was locked. “Here,” he said quietly, “is the heart of my store. Let me tell you again. Touch nothing. Look at nothing for too long unless I instruct you otherwise. Take nothing.”

Kaylin bridled slightly, but Severn merely nodded. “How difficult will that be, old man?”

“Maybe you are a Hawk after all,” Evanton replied, eyeing Severn with barely veiled curiosity. “And the answer to that question is, I don’t know. I have no trouble.” He paused and added, “But that was not always the case. And I did not have myself as a guide, when I first came here.”

“Who did you have?” Kaylin asked, tilting her head to one side.

He raised a white brow.

“Sorry, Evanton.”

“Good girl. Oh, and Kaylin? I continue to allow you to visit here because of the great respect I have always felt for the Officers of the Halls of Law.”

“But I haven’t—” She stopped moving for a moment, and then brought her free hand up to her cheek to touch the skin across which lay a tattoo of a simple herb: Nightshade, by name. Deadly Nightshade, she thought to herself.

If it had only been a tattoo, it would never cause her trouble. It felt like skin to her, and the Hawks had become so used to it, she could almost forget it existed.

But this mark was—of course—magical, and it had been placed on her cheek by Lord Nightshade, a Barrani Lord who was outcaste to his people, and oh, wanted by every division in the Halls of Law for criminal activities beyond the river that divided the city itself.

Lord Nightshade had marked her, and the mark meant something to the Barrani. It meant something to the Dragons. To the other mortal races, it was generally less offensive than most tattoos. But clearly, it meant something to Evanton, purveyor of junk and the odd useful magic. He understood that it linked her, in ways that not even Kaylin fully understood, to Lord Nightshade himself.

But if Evanton’s eyes were narrowed, they were not suspicious. “Here,” he told her quietly, “there is some safety from the mark you bear. He will not find you, if he is looking.” He pushed the door open so slowly, Kaylin could have sworn she could feel the hours pass. “Is he?”

“Is he what?”

“Looking.”

She shrugged, uneasy. “He knows where to find me,” she said at last.

“Not, perhaps, a good thing, in your case. But enough. You are clearly yourself.”

“You can tell that how?”

“You could not have crossed my threshold if you were under his thrall.”

She nodded. Believing him. Wanting to know why she couldn’t have.

Severn spoke instead. “You sent a message to the Halls?”

“Ah. No, actually, I didn’t. If you check your Records carefully, you will not find a single—”

Severn lifted his hand. “Where did you send the message?”

“Ah. That would be telling. And probably telling too much,” the old man replied. “But people in power have an odd sense of what’s important. I imagine one of them took the time to read my elegant missive.”

“You expected this visit.”

“Of course. Forgive the lack of hospitality, but I don’t drink, and I can’t stand tea.”

And he held the door slightly ajar, motioning them in. Watching them both more carefully than he had ever watched Kaylin before. She wasn’t certain how she knew this, because he looked the same—eyes and skin crinkled in lines around his lips, the narrow width of his face. He wasn’t smiling, but he almost never did.

She meant to say something, but the words escaped her because from the width of the hall and the door she had expected the room to be tiny. And it was the size—and the height—of the Aerie in the Halls, where the winged Aerians who served the Hawklord could reach for, and almost touch, the sky.

Sunlight streamed down from above, as if through colored glass; the air moved Kaylin’s hair across her cheeks, suggesting breeze and open space. As a fiefling, she had had no great love of open spaces, but daylight had always suggested safety. There was a hint of that safety here, and it surprised her—magic almost always made her skin crawl.

The wooden plank flooring, often covered with carpets that made the floors look both older and more rickety, rather than less, had given way entirely to … grass. Blue-green grass, thick and short, that was so perfect she was almost afraid to take a step on it without removing her boots. She couldn’t see the far walls—she imagined this was because they were painted the color of sky—but she could see trees—tall trees—and the hint of water ahead, and to her left, the large curve of boulders seen between slender trunks.

A garden.

A magical garden.

“Yes,” Evanton said, as the door clicked shut at her back. She turned slowly to face him and saw that he had changed. His clothing was different, for one, and he seemed to stand slightly taller; the stoop in his shoulders, the bend, the perpetual droop of his neck, had disappeared. He was not young, would never be young, but age had majesty here that it had never had before.

“Yes?”

“It is a magic, of a type, Kaylin Neya. If you stand here for long enough, and you listen carefully, you might hear the sound of your name on the wind.” He paused, and then tendered her something shocking: A perfect, formal bow. “Lord Kaylin,” he said quietly, “of the High Court.”

“Don’t you start, too,” she began, but he waved her to silence.

“In this place, names have import, and there are rumors, girl.”

“Never bet on a rumor.”

His expression shifted and twisted, and for a moment she could see the man she had first met in this changed one. “Why not? You do.” He lifted an arm; blue cloth clung to it in a drape that reminded her of Barrani High Court clothing. It was not so fine in line, and it hung a little long, and perhaps a little heavily, on his scrawny frame—but it suggested … gravity. Experience.

Maybe even nobility, and no one sent Kaylin to talk to the nobles. Or the people who—far worse—wanted to be nobles and hadn’t quite made it yet, in their own minds.

“I bet small change,” she began. Severn snorted.

“Small change,” Severn told Evanton, unphased by the change in the man, “is all Kaylin ever has.”

“So you bet everything you have, time and again? You really should choose different companions, girl. But,” he added, staring at Severn again, “I don’t disapprove of this one.”

“You didn’t disapprove of Teela or Tain, that I recall.”

“It hardly matters, where the Barrani are concerned. And Teela is a slightly unusual case. I have known her for some time,” he added, almost gently. “She was the first customer I had in this store, when I finally opened it.”

“When you finally opened it?”

“Ah, yes. It took me some time to find my way back. From this place,” he added, looking beyond Kaylin, his eyes slightly unfocused. She knew the look; he was remembering something. Something she was certain he wasn’t about to share. “And she was waiting, with, I might add, her usual patience.” Which would of course be none at all.

“How long had she waited?”

“Quite a while, from all accounts. It was well before she joined the Hawks,” he added, “and she cut a formidable figure.”

Thinking about the drug dealers on the banks of the Ablayne—the ones who had been unfortunate enough to sell Lethe—Kaylin said, “She’s pretty damn formidable now.”

“In a fashion. She was waiting for me, and she was not with Tain. She did have a greatsword, however, a fine piece of work. It predated the Empire,” he added. “But I do not believe it was a named weapon.”

“Don’t believe? You mean you aren’t certain?” Kaylin felt her jaw drop. Luckily, it was attached to her face, or it would have bounced off the grass.

“Not entirely certain, no. There was something of a glamour on it, and since it looked like a serviceable, if old-fashioned, sword, the glamour clearly wasn’t there to make it look more impressive. But making it look less impressive, holding some power in reserve—that’s Barrani all over.”

She shook her head. “Teela doesn’t even use a sword.”

“If the sword she had with her that day were one of the named weapons, she wouldn’t—she wouldn’t insult the responsibility of ownership by using a lesser blade. What does she use, anyway?”

“Mostly hands or feet, but sometimes a great big stick.”

He nodded.

Severn, who was the model of studied patience, finally spoke, scattering the pleasant gossip to the winds that Evanton had mentioned. “Why are you showing us this?”

“A very good question. I’m surprised Kaylin didn’t ask it,” he added, frowning at her, although he spoke to Severn. “She always asks too many questions—they try what little patience I’ve managed to preserve.” But he said it without rancor. “This is not unlike the High Halls of the Barrani—and if I’m not mistaken, Corporal Handred, you are also entitled to be called Lord while you are in the High Halls.”

Severn nodded.

“This place is, however, older, I think, than the Halls, and one of the few such ancient places within the city that are not governed by either Barrani or the Dragon Emperor himself.

“Although when I was called to answer for my stewardship of this place, I will say the Dragon Emperor was a tad … testy. I’d advise you to stay on his good side when you do meet him.”

“You mean the side without the teeth, right?” Kaylin asked.

Evanton chuckled. “That side, yes, although the tail can be quite deadly.”

She didn’t ask him how he knew this. His words had caught up with her thoughts. “What do you mean when I meet him?”

His frown was momentary. “Never mind, girl. All in good—or bad—time. He is watching you, but even his reach is not so long that he can see you here. He is almost certainly aware that you are here, however.”

“What do you mean?”

“He has my shop watched.”

“Oh.” She paused, and took a step forward into a room that was, in her eyes, almost devoid of any trace of human interference. But … it belonged to Evanton, and because it did, she could see odd things that lay on stone pedestals, on stone shelves, and in alcoves that lined the nearest walls. Things that held candles—candelabras?—that were lined up in perfect precision, unlit and therefore unblemished. There were books, boxes that looked as if they’d been left out in the rain—and the sun and the snow for good measure—and small, golden tablets that looked as if they had, conversely, barely been touched by eyes. Still, it was the candles that caught her attention.

“Are they ever lit?”

“Never,” Evanton replied. “And if they are to be lit, let it be during someone else’s watch.”

She nodded and kept walking, and after a while, she said, “This is circular, this room?”

“A large circle, but yes.” Evanton’s eyes were gleaming and dark as he answered. His nod was more a nod of approval than Kaylin had ever seen from him. She took encouragement from it, and continued to watch the room with the eyes—the trained eyes—of a hawk.

Saw a small pond, saw a fire burning in a brazier; felt the wind’s voice above her head and saw the leaves turn at its passing. Saw, in the distance, a rock garden in which no water trickled.

She said, “Elemental.”

And Evanton nodded again.

“Severn?”

“I concur. But it is unusual.”

“And the books, Evanton?”

“Good girl,” he said softly. “Those, do not touch. You may approach them, but do not touch them.”

“I doubt I’d be able to read them.”

“It is not in the reading that they present the greatest threat, and Kaylin, if you spoke no words at all, if you were entirely deprived of language, these books would still speak to you.”

“Magic,” she said with disdain.

“Indeed, and older magic than the magic that is the current fashion. Fashion,” he added, “may be frowned on by the old, but I believe that the trend is not a bad one.”

She half closed her eyes. Listened to the voice of the wind as it rustled through slender branches; golden leaves, white leaves and a pale, pale bloodred, all turned as it passed. Heard, for a moment, a name that was not quite hers as she looked up, to feel its touch across her cheeks.

The mark of Nightshade began to tingle. It was not entirely comfortable. Without thinking, she lifted a hand to her face to touch the mark.

“The mark you bear affords you some protection. He must value you, Kaylin,” Evanton said. He was closer than she realized; she should have heard his shuffling step, but she had heard only the wind. And felt, for a moment, the glimmering dream of flight.

His voice dispelled the wind’s, sent it scattering, left her bound—as she would always be bound—to ground. And because he simply waited, she began to walk again.

To the pond, where small shelves and altars sat across moss beds. Books lay there, and again, candles, unlit, by the dozen. There were small boxes, and a mirror—the first she’d seen since she’d entered this room.

“The mirror—”

“Do not touch it.”

“Wasn’t going to,” she said, although her hand stopped in midair. “But does it work?”

“Work?”

“Is it functional? If I wanted to send a message, could I?”

“Not,” he replied, “to anyone you would care to speak to.” It was an evasion. She accepted it. At the moment, the investigation—such as it was, since he hadn’t actually told them anything useful—was not about mirrors or messages, but it was the first truly modern thing she’d encountered.

Yet even as she thought it, she looked at the mirror, and thought again. Its surface was tarnished and cloudy, and its frame, gold and silver, poorly tended. Unlike the rest of the small, jeweled boxes, the reliquaries—she recognized them for that now—this had been left alone.

“Do they all have mirrors?”

“All?”

“The elemental gardens. There should be four—the fire in the brazier, the water in this small pond, the rocks just beyond those silver trees. I can’t see anything for air—”

“It is very, very hard to build a garden to air,” he replied. “But it is here, and perhaps it is the freest of the elements because it can travel so readily. And the answer is no. None of them do.”

“But this one—”

“Was brought here. It does not belong in this room.”

“But you haven’t moved it.”

“No,” he replied. “And until the Hawks deem it wise, I will not return it to its place. But do not touch it. The hand that held it last left some impression, but it will not, I think, be the equal of yours.”

“You think of everything.”

“I? Hardly. Had I, you would not be here now.”

“Good point. Maybe.” It was hard to leave the mirror, but she did, because the surface of the pond was everything the surface of the mirror was not: clean, smooth, reflective. The breeze that blew above did not touch it at all; she wondered if a pebble would ripple its surface.

“No,” Evanton replied, as if he were reading her mind—which she’d gotten used to in the last few weeks, but still didn’t much care for. “It would not. The earth and the water barely meet here. The pond is not wide,” he added, “but it runs very, very deep.”

She nodded. “These footprints,” she said, although she had barely grazed ground with her eyes, “aren’t yours.”

“No.”

“You know whose they are?”

“I have some suspicion.”

Severn knelt with care at Kaylin’s side and examined the moss. He had seen what she had seen, of course. “There are at least two sets,” he told them both. “The larger set belongs to a person of heavier build than the smaller. I would say human, and probably male, from the size.”

Evanton’s answer was lost.

Kaylin was gazing at the surface of the pond. Although the water was clear, there was a darkness in the heart of it that seemed endless. Deep, he had said, and she now believed it; you could throw a body down here and it would simply vanish. The idea of taking a swim had less than no appeal.

But the water’s surface caught and held light, the light from the ceiling above, the one that Aerians would so love, it was that tall.

She could almost see them fly across it, reflected for a moment in passage, and felt again the yearning to fly and be free. To join them.

It was illusion, of course. There was no such thing as freedom. There was only—

Reflection. Movement.

Not hers, and not Severn’s; Evanton stood far enough back that he cast no reflection.

“Kaylin?” Severn said, his voice close to her ear.

But Kaylin was gazing now into the eyes—the wide eyes— of a child’s bruised face. A girl, her hair long and stringy in the way that unwashed children’s hair could often be, her skin pale with winter, although winter was well away. She wore clothing that was too large for her, and threadbare, and undyed. She wore nothing at all on her feet, for Kaylin could see her toes, dirt in the nails.

She came back to the eyes.

The girl whispered a single word.

Kaylin.

CHAPTER
2

The first thing Kaylin had been taught when she’d been allowed to accompany groundhawks on her first investigation of a crime scene was Do not touch anything or we will never bring you back. This also meant, Do not embarrass us by attempting to steal anything. The Hawks were pretty matter-of-fact about her upbringing; they didn’t actually care. The fiefs couldn’t be actively policed, so it wasn’t as if anything she’d done there was on record. If she had been canny enough to survive life on the streets of Nightshade, tough enough to emerge unscathed, and idealistic enough to want to uphold the Law rather than slide through its grip, so much the better.

It had been a missing-person investigation—which usually meant dead person whose body had yet to be found—and they’d walked the narrow streets that faced the fiefs without—quite—touching them. The Law still ruled in this old, boarded-up manor house, by a riverbank and a couple of narrow bridges.

She had been all of fourteen years old, and had spent six long months begging, badgering, and wheedling; when they said yes, she could follow them, she had nearly stopped breathing.

By that point, being a Hawk was the only thing she wanted, and she had held her fidget-prone hands by her sides, stiff as boards, while the Hawks—Teela and Tain for the most part, although Marcus had come along to supervise—had rambled about a series of large, run-down rooms for what felt like hours.

There wasn’t much in the way of temptation on that particular day: nothing worth stealing.

Nothing she wanted to touch.

But this was so much harder. The girl was young. Younger than many of her orphans, the kitlings she visited, taught to read, and told stories—casually censored—of her adventures to. This girl was bruised; her eyes were wide with terror, her face gaunt with either cold or hunger. And she was real.

The water did not distort her; she did not sink into the depths, beckoning for Kaylin to follow to a watery, slow death. There was an aura about her, some faint hint of magic, but there would have to be.

Kaylin knelt with care by the side of this deep, deep pond, this scion of elemental magics. She did not touch the water’s surface, but it was a struggle not to; not to reach out a hand, palm out, to the child whose dark eyes met hers.

As if he knew it—and he probably did—Severn was behind her. He did not approach the water as closely as she herself had done, but instead put both of his hands on her shoulders and held tight.

“Corporal,” she heard Evanton say quietly, “what do you see?”

“Water,” Severn replied. “Very, very deep water.”

“Interesting.”

“You?”

“I see many things,” Evanton replied. “Always. The water here is death.” He paused and then added, “Almost everything is, to the unwary, in this place.”

“Figures,” Kaylin heard herself say, in a voice that was almost normal. “But whose death?”

“A good question, girl. As always.”

“You usually tell me my questions are—”

“Hush.”

But the girl didn’t vanish until Evanton came to stand by Kaylin’s side. “You’re not one for obedience, blind or otherwise,” he told her, with just a hint of frustration in a voice that was mostly approving. “But I believe I told you to look at nothing too closely.”

“If you saw what I saw—”

“I may well, girl. But as I said, I see many things that the water chooses to reveal. There is always temptation, here, and it knows enough to see deeply.”

“This is not—”

“Is it not? Here you sit, spellbound, horrified, gathering and hoarding your anger—which, I believe, is growing as the minutes pass. It isn’t always things that tempt our basest desire—not all temptation is sensual or monetary in nature.” He lifted his hands and gestured and the water rippled at the passage of a strong, strong gust.

All images were broken as it did, and the girl’s face passed into memory—but it was burned there. Kaylin would not forget. Couldn’t. Didn’t, if she were honest, have any desire to do so.

“I know what you saw, Kaylin Neya. More of your life is in your face than you are aware of, in this place. And in the store,” he added quietly.

“This is why you called me,” she said, half a question in the flat statement.

“On the contrary, Kaylin, I requested no one. But this, I believe, has some bearing on the call the Hawks did receive. Even had I wanted to deal with the Law directly—and I believe that there are reasons for avoiding it—I would merely send the report or the request. The old, belligerent Leontine who runs the office would decide who actually responds.”

“Marcus,” she said automatically. “Sergeant Kassan.”

“Very well, Sergeant Kassan, although it was clear by description to whom I referred.” He paused, and then added, “Something was taken from this … room.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “How the hell did someone get into this room?”

“A very good question, and believe that I have friends who are even now considering the problem.”

“Friends?”

“At my age, they are few, and not all of them are mortal, but,” he added, and his face warped into a familiar, wizened expression, “even I have some.”

“And they—”

“I have merely challenged them to break into the elementarium without causing anything to alert me to their presence.”

“Good luck,” she muttered.

“They will need more than luck,” he said softly. “But I expect most of them will survive it.”

She straightened slowly, her knees slightly cricked. It made her wonder how long she’d knelt there. The answer was too damn long; she was still tired from the previous night’s birthing. But the elation of saving a cub’s life passed into shadow, as it so often did.

“What was stolen?” she asked Evanton as she rose. Her voice fell into a regular Hawk’s cadence—all bored business. And watchful.

“A small and unremarkable reliquary,” he replied. “A red box, with gold bands. Both the leather and the gold are worn.”

“What was in it?”

“I am not entirely certain,” he replied, but it was in that I-have-some-ideas-and-I-don’t-want-to-tell tone of voice. “The box is locked. It was locked when I first arrived, and the keys that were made to open it … It has no keyhole, Kaylin.”

“So it can’t be opened.”

“Jumping to conclusions, I see.”

She grimaced. “It has to be opened magically.”

“Good girl,” he replied softly.

“This isn’t really Hawk work—”

“The Hawks don’t investigate thefts?”

“Ye-es,” she said, breaking the single syllable into two. “But not petty thefts as such, and not without a better description of the value of what’s been stolen.”

“People will die,” he told her quietly, “while the reliquary is at large. It exerts its power,” he added softly, “on those who see it and those who possess it. Only—” He stopped. His face got that closed-door look that made it plain he would say no more. Not yet.

“There were two people here,” she said at last.

“Yes. Two. An unusually large woman, or a heavyset man, by the look of those treads, and an unusually small one, or a child, by the look of the second.” He met her eyes.

And she knew who the child had been.

The shop seemed more mundane than it had ever seemed when Evanton escorted them back into it. His robes transformed as he crossed the threshold and the power of wisdom gave way to the power of age and gravity as his shoulders fell into their perpetual bend.

He was once again the ancient, withered shopkeeper and purveyor of odd junk and the occasional true magic. And this man, Kaylin had chattered at for most of her adolescence. If Severn was circumspect—a word she privately hated—she had no such compulsion.

“You think there are going to be murders associated with this theft.”

He didn’t even blink. “Indeed.”

“Or possibly already have been. When exactly did you notice this disturbance?”

“Yesterday,” he replied, his lips pursed as he sought his impossible-to-miss key ring.

“But you don’t think it happened yesterday?”

“I can’t be certain, no. As I said, I’ve sponsored a bit of a contest—”

She lifted a hand. “Don’t give me contests I can’t enter.”

He lifted a brow. “Oddly enough, Private, I think you’re one of the few who could. Possibly. You make a lot of noise, on the other hand, and it may—”

“Evanton, please, these are people’s lives we’re talking about.”

“Yes. But if I am to be somewhat honest, they are not lives, I feel, you would be in a hurry to save.”

“You’re dead wrong,” she said, meaning it.

“About at least one of them,” he said softly. “But if I am not mistaken, she is not—yet—in danger. I feel some of the mystery of their entrance can only be answered by her.”

“By a child?”

“You might wish to fill the corporal in on what you saw,” Evanton told her.

“It’s not necessary,” Severn replied, before Kaylin could. “I have a good idea of what she saw.”

“Oh?”

“She gets a particular look when she’s dealing with children in distress.” He paused and then said, voice devoid of all texture and all emotion, “Kaylin has always had a weakness for children. Even when she was, by all legal standards, a child herself.

“And that’s not a look she gets when the child is happy or looks well treated,” he added softly. “Then, she’s only wistful.”

Evanton nodded as if everything Severn had said confirmed what he already knew. “Very well. You make a good team,” he told them both. “He’s much better for you than those two Barrani slouchers.”

Kaylin sidestepped the question in the old man’s words. Remembered the brief touch of Severn’s palms on her cheeks. But that was personal. This was worse.

“What will the manner of death be?”

“That, I cannot tell you. It is very, very seldom that I invite visitors into the elementarium, and with cause. You felt compelled to touch nothing and take nothing, because that room had nothing to offer you.”

“I felt compelled—”

“Yes, but not to take, Kaylin. Not to acquire. And I cannot yet tell you why the water chose to show you the girl. I can only tell you that what you saw was in some fashion true.”

“She called me by name.”

He spun so fast she almost tripped over him and sent them both flying—which in his case would probably have broken every bone in his frail body. She managed to catch herself on the wall.

“By name?” he asked, one brow melding with his receding hairline.

She nodded.

“Ah, girl,” he said, with a shake of the head. He turned away again. “If I had found you first—”

“What does it mean?”

“I cannot say for certain,” he replied. “But this much, I can guess—she touched the heart of the elemental water, and woke some of its slumbering intent. It wants you to find her, Kaylin.”

“And that’s a bad thing.”

“It may well be,” Evanton replied. “But if I told you—if I could honestly tell you—that it would mean the end of the Empire itself were you to pursue it, you’d pursue it anyway.

“Water is canny that way. It sees into the deeps that we hide.” But he turned away as he spoke.

“Evanton—”

“Old man—”

He stopped as Severn and Kaylin’s words collided, but did not look back. “If you’re about to accuse me of knowing more than I’ve told you, stand in line and take a number,” he said in a voice so dry a little spark would have set it on fire. “I’m a very busy man. Do come and visit again.”

“Kaylin—”

Kaylin lifted a hand and swatted her name aside.

“You’re going to crack the road if you don’t stop walking like that.”

“Severn, I don’t have a sense of humor about—”

“Almost anything? Fair enough. I’ve been accused of that.”

She stopped walking. Although his stride was easily the longer of the two, she’d been making him work to keep up. Not that it showed. Much.

Since her entrance into the ranks of the Barrani High Court, Kaylin had grown more aware of Severn; of where he was, how close he was, or how far. It was as if—as if something bound them, something gossamer like spider’s web, but finer, and ultimately stronger. She had given him her name—if it was her name—and he had accepted it.

But he had never used it. When she shut him out, he accepted the distance.

It’s not my name, he had told her quietly, it’s yours. If I understand Barrani names at all.

I’m not Barrani.

You’re not human. Not completely. But you’re still Kaylin.

Could you? Could you use it?

He’d been quiet for a long time; she could still remember the texture of that silence, the way he’d stared at her face for a moment, and then turned away almost wearily. What do you want me to say, Kaylin?

She hadn’t answered. She wasn’t certain.

“We have to find her,” she told him, her voice quieter now.

“I know. Any idea where to start?”

Missing Persons was a zoo. Almost literally. Although the offices that fronted the public square in the Halls were slightly better equipped and more severe than the interior offices in which Kaylin spent much—too damn much—of her day, they were in no way quieter.

For one, they were full of people who would never—with any luck—wear a uniform that granted them any kind of Imperial authority. For two, the people who milled about, either shouting at each other, pacing, crying or shouting at the officers who looked appropriately harried, were by no means all human; although here, as throughout most sectors of Elantra, humans outnumbered the others by quite a large margin. For three, many of the visitors were either four times Kaylin’s age, or less than half of it. Kaylin recognized a smattering of at least four languages, and some of what was said was, in the words of Caitlin, “colorful.”

Impatience was the order of the day.

Missing Persons was, in theory, the responsibility of the Hawks. Depending, of course, upon who exactly was missing. Some missing persons had left a small trail of death and destruction in their wake, and these investigations were often—begrudgingly—handed over to the Wolves, the smallest of the three forces who called the Halls of Law home.

The staffing of the office, however, was the purview of the Hawklord. Or his senior officers. None of whom, Kaylin thought with a grimace, were ever on the floors here.

She herself was seldom here, and of all duties the Hawks considered their own, this was her least favorite. She was not always the most patient of people—and people who were desperate enough to come to the Halls seeking word of their missing, and possibly dead, kin required patience at the very least.

She was also not quite graceful enough to forgive other people their impatience. But at least she was aware of hers.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the vagabond.”

And, if she were entirely truthful, there were other reasons for hating this place. Grinding her teeth into what she hoped would pass for a smile, she faced the worst of them squarely.

If it was true that the Barrani had a lock on arrogance, and the Dragons on inscrutability, it was also true that for petty malice, you really couldn’t do better than finding a truly loathsome human. And to Kaylin’s youthful disappointment, she hadn’t actually had to look that far to find this one.

His name was Constant Mallory—and, give him this, if she’d had that as a name, and she’d been too stupid to change it, she might have developed a few personality ticks. He was, for all intents and purposes, the ruler of this small enclave. He answered to Marcus, and to the Hawklord, but his answers could be both disingenuous and fawning, and she thought he’d learned enough from the Barrani to dispense with truth entirely.

She was aware that he and Marcus had, as the office liked to call it, “history.” She’d once asked why, and Teela had said, with some disdain, “You really don’t pay attention, do you? How much of history is spent discussing happy children and fluffy bunnies?”

“It’s true,” Tain had half drawled. “If humans actually had a lifespan, things would have been a lot more interesting around here a few centuries ago. But that’s the problem with mortals—they get a little power and it all comes tumbling down. It’s a good thing you breed so quickly.”

Teela and Tain had no problems at all with Mallory. They didn’t like him, but then again, given the way they treated people they did like—and Kaylin had some experience with this—their lack of affection was a dubious negative. Like many humans, he treated the Barrani with respect and care. He had not always given Marcus the same respect.

Or rather, he’d given him exactly the same respect, but then again, Marcus took subtle office politics about as well as he took vegetarian menus.

Mallory had wanted the Leontine’s job. Then again, so had Marcus. Marcus had come out on top. The miracle of the tussle, to Kaylin’s mind, was that Mallory had come out alive. She gathered that not everyone had.

But getting people who’d been there to talk about it was more difficult than getting criminals to cough up useful information. And, as a harried Sergeant Kassan had finally said, “You’re usually so proud of your ignorance. Learn to live with it, Kaylin.” The implication being that living and living with it, on that particular day, were the same thing.

Mallory was tall. He was, by human standards, fit, and not even painful to look at: he was competent, quick-witted, and good with a sword. He handled his paperwork with care—a distinction that he did not fail to note on the rare occasions he was allowed to visit Caitlin’s office.

But he was a self-important prick, and he was the only Hawk of note who had spoken against her induction. The latter, she was unlikely to forget. The former, she had come to expect from the world at large.

His greeting was not in any way friendly. Her smile was not in any way friendly. It was, as Marcus called it with some distaste, a human social custom. Probably because it didn’t involve enough blood and fur.

But she had never come with Severn before.

And Severn became completely still beside her.

“Corporal Handred,” Mallory said, greeting him as if that stillness were not a warning signal. “Our newest recruit.”

Severn extended a hand, and Mallory took it firmly. “I see that they have you babysitting. It’s unusual to see the private in any company that isn’t Barrani. How are you finding the Hawks so far?”

“Interesting,” Severn replied. At least he hadn’t gone monosyllabic.

“Compared to the Wolves?”

Severn didn’t even pause. “Yes. Longer hours. I confess that I’ve seen many reports from your office, but I’ve seldom had a chance to visit in person.”

Mallory looked slightly at a loss, but he recovered quickly enough. “We do important work here,” he began, straightening his shoulders somewhat. “It’s here that most of the cases that require official attention are brought to the notice of the Law.”

“I imagine you deal with a lot of reports. How do you separate the frauds from the actual crimes?”

Mallory looked genuinely surprised, and Kaylin fought an urge to kick someone—mostly because she couldn’t decide whether or not she’d kick Severn or Mallory. Mallory took the lead, and Severn, walking by his side, continued to ask pleasant questions, his voice engulfed slowly by the office noise.

Leaving Kaylin on her own, with no Mallory vindictively standing over her shoulder. It was a trick not even Teela had ever tried.

There were two ways to get useful information about the missing persons being reported by the people who came to the Halls. The hard way—which was to take notes, to have the official artists employed by the Halls on hand, and to attempt to draw a picture of some sort that could be used as an identifier. This was both the least efficient and the most commonly used method of gaining some sort of visual information the Hawks could then use.

The second, and far more efficient, method involved the Tha’alani. And the reason it was little used was, in Kaylin’s opinion, pretty damn obvious. She looked across the crowded office as if the people in it were shadows and smoke, and against the far wall, bordered on either side by finely crafted wooden dividers, and no door, sat a gray-haired man.

At least he looked like a man from the back. But he wore robes, rather than the official uniform of the Hawks; if he was finicky about detail, there might be a gold Hawk embroidered on the left breast of the gray cloth; if he wasn’t, there would be nothing at all.

Kaylin preferred the nothing at all.

From the front, although he didn’t turn, the illusion of humanity would vanish; the slender stalks that rose from his forehead would be visible in the hallmark paleness of his face. His eyes would probably be blue; hard to tell with the Tha’alani, but then again, she usually avoided meeting their eyes—it meant she was standing too damn close.

Those stalks were their weapons, their means of invasion; they were prehensile, and they moved. They would attach themselves to the face of anyone—anything at all—in the Empire, and they would draw from that person’s thoughts everything. Everything they were told to look for. Possibly more. All the hidden secrets, the private memories, the terrors and the joys would be laid bare for their inspection.

Officially, there were no Tha’alani in the ranks of the Hawks; they were, however, always on call should the law require their services. The only office that had a Tha’alani on staff was this one, and he was a grant from the Imperial Court. All of the Tha’alani who served the Law were seconded by the Dragon Emperor. A warning to anyone who might otherwise treat them like the invasive horrors they actually were.

It was probably the real reason she hated the Missing Persons office so much. Men like Mallory were so common in her life, she could only expend so much energy hating him. Most of the time.

To the left of the stall in which the Tha’alani sat, back facing her, was a long, slender mirror edged in gold that had seen better days. It was flecked and peeling. It was also out of sight of the public, tucked as it was against the other edge of the wall and the divider.

Records.

She squared her shoulders and moved toward the mirror on the wall. It was inactive and she could see Severn and Mallory bent over Mallory’s impeccable desk, discussing something that no doubt would have bored her to tears. She probably owed Severn a drink or ten.

She walked toward the mirror, and forced herself to relax, to walk naturally. She tried to remember the one Tha’alani woman she had met that had not somehow terrified her. She was slender, and had reminded Kaylin inexplicably of warm sun in autumn. Now, however, was not the time to think of sunlight, or warmth. It made her job difficult. Instead, Kaylin tried to remember what Ybelline had said about the lives of the Tha’alani who could serve time among the “deaf,” and by that, she had clearly meant humans. Kaylin’s kind. No, wait, one of the Dragons had said that.

The Tha’alani woman, Ybelline, had corrected him gently for his unkindness, although Kaylin hadn’t bothered to be kind first.

Ybelline had somehow made Kaylin feel comfortable and safe. Had taken memories from the sleeping child she and Severn had brought with them to the office—a child kidnapped by the undead, and almost sacrificed—sparing the child the waking experience of the Tha’alani mind-touch. Holding on to that memory, Kaylin did relax.

Until she was almost at the records mirror itself, and the Tha’alani rose.

He was older than any Tha’alani she had ever met, although he was by no means as aged as Evanton; his hair, which had looked gray, was gray, and his face was lined with age, with sun and wind. His eyes were slate-gray, not a friendly color, and his lips were thin and pale.

And the disturbing stalks on his forehead were weaving in and out among themselves, as if it were the only way he knew how to fidget. It came to Kaylin as she watched them warily that he was, in fact, fidgeting.

Had she ever noticed this before?

Did they all do this?

There was no Hawk on his robes, no official sign. She wondered if he was always in this office, or if he was only here on this particular shift. Wondered, with just a faint edge of hysteria to sharpen the humor, what he’d done to deserve it, if he was.

But he bowed to her, and by this, she knew two things: that he’d risen because she approached him, and only because of that, and that he’d been somehow waiting for her. It didn’t make her comfortable. For perhaps the first time she noticed, as he rose, the deepening lines around his mouth, the slight thinning of his lips. As a thirteen-year-old girl, she had thought it a cruel expression, and that had left scars in her memory that had been slow to heal.

Now … she thought, as objectively as she could—and given she was Kaylin that was hard—that it might be a grimace of pain. And she felt, mingled with her own very visceral revulsion, a twinge of sympathy for a total stranger.

She tried very hard not to notice the way his stalks were swaying. But she did notice; they were swaying to and fro, but almost seemed to be shying away. From her. From, she realized, her revulsion.

She swallowed. Composed herself—as much as that was possible. “Private Kaylin Neya,” she said, introducing herself. She did not offer him her hand, and he did not extend his own.

“I am called Draalzyn, by my people.” The word was broken by an unexpected syllable. The Tha’alani had a language that Kaylin had never bothered to learn because as far as she could tell it contained no colorful—which is to say useful—words. It, in fact, seemed to be free of most words; when Tha’alani conversed, they conversed in silence, and only their hands and their stalks seemed to move. They also touched each other too much.

And she was projecting again. She could see that clearly by the subtle shift of his expression. She wanted to tell the bastard to keep away from her thoughts. It was her first reaction.

But a second reaction followed swiftly. She knew she was the proverbial open book; how often in her life had Severn just glanced at her face and known what it was that was bothering her? She’d never bothered to count. Probably couldn’t count that high unless it involved a wager.

And the second thought, the Tha’alani almost seemed to sense, for his expression grew slightly less severe.

“Private,” Draalzyn said quietly, “I hoped to see you at some point in time.”

“I work inside.”

He nodded. He knew where she worked; that much was clear to her. He seemed to have trouble speaking; he opened his mouth several times, as if searching for words. Or, as if he’d found them, and discarded them as useless.

She waited, eyeing the mirror, and catching a reflected glimpse of Severn as he ran interference. It wouldn’t last.

At last the Tha’alani said, “Ybelline asked me to carry a message to you, if our paths should cross.”

Ybelline. The one Tha’alani Kaylin had met that she had almost liked.

“Why me?” Unlike Draalzyn, Kaylin rarely bothered to stop the words that first came to mind from falling out of her mouth. But she remembered this honey-haired woman so clearly she felt almost—almost—protective of her. She had been so gentle with Catti, an orphan, as unwanted by the world at large as Kaylin had been at her age.

“She believed you could be of assistance to us,” he replied quietly. “And the matter is of some urgency.” He paused, and she realized that the pallor of his face was probably unnatural. He was worried. Or frightened. Or both.

“What’s happened?”

“If you would come to her dwelling in the enclave—or if you would choose a meeting place that is not so crowded in the city itself, she will explain.”

Kaylin nodded.

And the Tha’alani seemed to relax; his shoulders slumped a little in the folds of his robe, as if he had been expecting something else.

Fair enough. Had it been any other Tha’alani, any at all, Kaylin would have refused. Or worse.

“She is willing, of course, to promise that there will be no intrusion, and nothing will be taken from you without—”

Kaylin lifted a hand. “I know the drill,” she said, “and you don’t have to repeat it. I—trust her. And I don’t have time,” she added bitterly, looking again at the mirror’s surface, and at Mallory.

“You wish to access records without interference?” he asked. As if he had read her—no, she told herself forcefully. It was bloody obvious he had. You’d have to be blind and stupid not to recognize the fact.

“Yes.”

“You are looking for?”

She stopped. Looked at him, truly looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. The Tha’alani worked in this office for a reason. But—

The image of a bruised child’s face rose up before her eyes, captured in water’s depths. It was so strong, so clear, that she couldn’t shake it. It was more concrete in that moment than the rest of the office.

The man waited.

She noted this, her Hawk’s training in place. And she knew as well that all real images that went into records, any real information, would come, in the end, through him or his kin.

“You know what’s in the records?”

“Not all of it,” he began.

“The recent reports. You might know if someone came in looking for a missing girl.”

“Of what age?” His eyes seemed to glaze over, as if he were a living embodiment of what the records contained, and he was accessing the data.

“Nine, maybe ten. Scraggly dark hair, dark eyes. Pale skin. Poor family, I think.”

“How long would she be considered missing?”

“I … don’t know. More than two days.” Maybe, given her condition, many more.

He was still frowning.

And Kaylin clenched her jaw tightly, stepped forward toward him, and, lifting her hands, drew her hair from her forehead. She was shaking. But the girl’s image was strong enough.

“You know this child?” he asked, understanding exactly what she offered.

“No. But I’ve seen her once.”

“And you are willing—” But he stopped. He was, by law, required to give her a long speech full of unreassuring reassurances.

None of which she had time for. He did her the courtesy of not failing to read this clearly, and held her gaze for just that little bit longer than required. She didn’t blink.

His forehead stalks began to elongate, to thin, as they moved toward her exposed skin.

“Don’t touch the mark,” she warned him.

“Ah,” he replied. “No. I will not.”

And they were feathery, those stalks, like the brush of fingertips against forehead. He did not touch her face with his hands, did nothing to hold her in place. In every way, this was unlike the first time she had submitted to the Tha’alani. But this was an act of choice.

And if he saw more than she wanted him to see, what of it? It made her squirm, the fear of exposure, and she balanced that fear—as she so often did—with the greater fear: the child’s bruised face. The frustration, anger and, yes, pride and joy that she felt just being deemed worthy to bear the Hawk. The fear of failing what that meant, all that that entailed.

The Tha’alani stalks were pale and trembling, as if in a breeze, but they lingered a long time against her skin, although she did not relive any memories but the memory of the water, its dark, dark depths, and the emergence of that strange child’s face.

Then he withdrew, and he offered her a half-bow. He rose quickly, however, dispensing courtesy as required, and with sincerity, but no more. “I better understand Ybelline’s odd request,” he told her quietly. “And I do not know if what I tell you will give you comfort or grief, but no such child has been reported missing. There is no image of her in the records.

“But go, and speak with Ybelline, Private Neya. I fear that your partner is about to lose his composure.” He bent to his desk, and wrote something carefully in bold, neat Barrani lettering. An address.

CHAPTER
3

“And you’ve never hit him?” Severn asked, as they left the crowded courtyard behind in the growing shadows of afternoon.

“No. He and Marcus have history. I couldn’t find where Mallory’d buried the skeletons in his closet, so it didn’t seem wise. Marcus, in case you hadn’t noticed, has a bit of a temper.”

Severn’s dark brow rose slightly. “Wise? You have grown.” He paused and added, “He probably doesn’t have them in his closet—he probably has them neatly categorized by bone type in his filing cabinets.”

Kaylin snickered. “You feel like a long walk?”

“Was that rhetorical?”

“No. Whatever that means. We can walk, or we can hail a cab.”

“Given the pocket change you have for the next few days, we’ll walk.”

“Ha-ha.”

“But I wouldn’t mind knowing where we’re going.”

She frowned. “I know where I’m going.”

“You know where you want to be,” he replied.

“I know the city, Severn.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been led to understand that you know every inch of every beat you’ve ever covered.”

“And your point is?”

“Let’s just say I take Sergeant Kassan’s warnings seriously—and I have my doubts that you’ve covered this beat much.”

“Why?”

“You’re walking toward the moneyed part of town.”

She shrugged. It was true. Marcus said that she could make dress uniform look grungy when it had just left the hands of the Quartermaster. You needed a certain bearing to police this section of town, and Kaylin had its opposite. Whatever that was.

Kaylin’s unerring sense of non-direction added about an hour to their travel time. She cursed whomever had built the streets in gutteral Leontine, and the fifth time she did this, Severn let out a long sigh and held out his hand, palm up.

She shoved the address into it. “Don’t even think of saying it.”

He did her the grace of keeping laughter off his face, but his brows rose as he read the address. “You’re going there?”

“Yes,” she said tersely. Followed by, “How the hell do you know where it is?”

“I know Elantra, Kaylin. All of it that’s in records. I know the historical shape of the streets, the newer sections, the oldest parts of the town. I’m familiar with the wharves, and the quarters given to the Caste Lords of each of the racial enclaves.

“I’m less familiar with the southern stretch,” he added. He would be. That was where the Aerians lived. “The Wolves seldom run there.”

Of course. He was a Wolf. A Wolf in Hawk’s clothing. “Lead on,” she said quietly. “And yes, I’m going voluntarily.”

“Who lives here?”

“Ybelline.”

“I know of only one Ybelline who works outside of the Tha’alani enclave in any official capacity.” He gave her an odd look.

“Yes. It’s the same Ybelline. We met her—”

“You met her,” he said gently.

“—when the Dragons came to talk.”

“You didn’t seem to love her then.”

“She’s Tha’alani.” Kaylin shrugged.

“Kaylin—why are you going? Your feelings about the Tha’alani have been widely quoted in the office memos whenever someone’s bored.”

She shrugged. “She asked to see me.”

He stopped walking. “I’m serious, Kaylin.”

Kaylin didn’t. “I can tell.” Severn’s stride was long enough that he could damn well catch up. He did, and caught her arm; she was in good enough shape that he staggered a step before bringing her to a halt.

She thought about lying to him, because she didn’t feel she owed him the truth. But when she opened her mouth, she said, “She didn’t touch me. But—when I looked at her, when I saw what she did for Catti, I thought she could. That I would let her. That she would see everything about me that I despise and she wouldn’t care. She would like me anyway.”

“You trusted her.”

Kaylin shrugged. She’d learned the gesture from Severn. “I always trust my instincts,” she said at last. “And yes. Even though she—yes. I felt I could.”

“Where are you going?”

Kaylin stopped. “I’m following you.”

“Which is usually done from behind.”

They had a small argument about Kaylin’s insistence on logging the hours she spent walking, because, as Severn pointed out, at least forty-five minutes of those were her going in circles.

“It’s not even clear that this visit pertains to any ongoing investigation in the department,” Severn added, “and it may well turn out to be more personal in nature.”

“Believe me,” Kaylin snapped back, “if the Hawklord knew that I’d received even an informal invitation from any of the Tha’alani—”

“He’d be astute enough to send someone else.”

“Very funny.”

“I wasn’t entirely joking.”

She made a face. “If he knew—and if you’re finished?—he’d make it a top priority. We don’t get much in the way of communication from the Tha’alani enclave.”

“For obvious reasons.”

“And there are at most a handful of cited cases in which the Tha’alani have sought the services of officers of Imperial Law in any context. He’d call it outreach,” she added, with a twist of lips.

“That would be like diplomacy? He’d definitely send someone else.”

“Like who? Marcus? Teela? Tain?”

“I was thinking of the Aerians. They’re fairly levelheaded for people who don’t like to keep their feet on the ground.”

But as arguments went, it was verbal fencing, and it generated little rage. It also gave Kaylin something else to think about as she approached the gated enclave behind which the Tha’alani lived. They were not numerous for a mortal race, and they very seldom mingled with outsiders.

Kaylin had never been on the other side of those gates, and they had always held a particular terror for her, because beyond them was a whole race of people who could see—if they wanted to—her every thought, past and present. Who could, at a whim, make her relive every deed, every wrong, every humiliation.

It was kind of like the waking version of a familiar nightmare, in which she suddenly appeared in her office without a stitch of clothing on.

Severn seemed unconcerned, but he always did.

And she was competitive enough that she had to match that, schooling her expression as she approached the gate itself. It was large enough to allow a full carriage or a wagon easy egress, but it was—and would remain—closed, unless there were reason to open it. No, the way in and out was through the gatehouse itself.

Which she had also only seen from the outside.

Clint had brought her, when she was fifteen; he had complained about her weight for the entire trip because she’d begged him to fly, and he had loudly and grudgingly agreed—when she’d promised to leave his flight feathers alone for at least two weeks.

From a distance—the safest one—the gates had still been a shadow and a threat, and it was the only part of the city she had refused to look at while he flew by. His words carried—the lovely, deep timbre of his voice was something she had never learned to ignore—but only his words, and his words alone had painted the picture she now saw clearly.

She could still hear echoes of the words that the wind hadn’t snatched away, and the murmur of his Aerian cadences.

Severn took the lead, and she let him.

She had something to prove, but found, to her annoyance, that pride had its limits. Even annoyance couldn’t overcome them. Because the man—the single man—at the gate was Tha’alani. And he wore not the familiar robes that she had come to hate, but rather a surcoat in the same odd gray over a chain hauberk whose arms glinted in the sunlight, making clear that the Tha’alani were a lot more fastidious in their armor care than the Officers of the Law—or someone else did the cleaning.

“Severn,” she said, stalling for time even as they approached the sole guard, “have you ever had to run down a Tha’alani?”

“Probably as often as you’ve had to investigate one,” he replied. Answer enough.

“Do they never report their crimes?”

He shrugged. “Either that, or they never commit them.”

He must have believed that about as much as she did. But if a crime did not affect a member of another racial enclave, it was the prerogative of the enclave—and its Castelord—to deal with the crime itself in the custom of their kind. And the racial enclaves were not required to submit any legal proceedings to the Halls of Law. Kaylin had thought it cheating when she’d first joined the Hawks, and had complained about these separate laws bitterly—until it was pointed out that were they not separate she would have to learn them all, and probably the languages they were written in.

Or growled in.

After that, she’d kept the complaints to herself.

The guard turned toward them as they approached, aligning first the stalks on his forehead, and then his face and body, as if the latter were afterthought. Severn appeared to take no notice of this, but Kaylin found it unsettling.

She could not see the color of his eyes, but realized after a moment that she could clearly see said eyes—that this guard, like the Leontines and the Barrani, wore no helm. Of course he didn’t wear a helmet, she thought bitterly. It would cripple his most effective weapon. She shoved her hand into her pocket, and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. If it had taken her that damn long to notice something that damn obvious, she was letting her nerves get the better of her.

But Severn was ahead of her, and before she could even uncurl the wretched thing, he said to the guard, “We have come at the invitation of Ybelline Rabon’alani.”

The guard’s expression froze in place, and his stalks waved a moment in the air. He looked carefully at the hawk emblazoned on both of their surcoats, and then searched their faces.

After this silent inspection, he nodded, not to Severn, but to Kaylin, who stood in his shadow. “She will see you,” he said, the words oddly inflected. “Someone will meet you on the other side of the guard house and show you the way to her home.”

“Someone” was another guard, another man in mail. His hair was a pale shade of brown, but it was long, and he wore it in a braid over his left shoulder. His eyes were clear, not golden the way Dragons’ eyes were, but still some shade that was paler than brown, darker than sunlight. He bowed, rising, and she thought him younger than the guard at the gate. His eyes were alive with unspoken curiosity, and his expression was actually an expression.

He stared at her, and she stared back.

“I’m Epharim,” he finally said, his stalks weaving through stray strands of his hair. He waited, and then after a moment, he reddened and held out a hand.

Kaylin took it slowly, and shook it. If it was true you could tell a lot about a person by shaking their hand, she wasn’t sure what she could take out of this handshake. It was stiff, hesitant, almost entirely unnatural.

“Did I do that right?” he said, retrieving his hand, his gaze still far too intent.

“Do what?”

“Greet you.”

“Yes, Epharim,” Severn replied, stepping on Kaylin’s foot before she could open her mouth. Well, before she could speak, at any rate. “I am Corporal Severn Handred, and this is Private Kaylin Neya. We serve the Emperor in the Halls of Law.” He offered his hand in turn, and Epharim took it, repeating the gesture that was supposed to be a handshake.

He beamed. “And what does it mean?” Each word a little too distinct, as if speech itself were something new and unfamiliar. Or as if the language were. But he spoke the common tongue of Elantra, and if the cadences were off, they were, each and every syllable, completely recognizable.

Severn said, “We don’t use names that have specific meanings.” Clearly, Severn had been a master student in racial studies.

“You don’t have a naming tongue?” Epharim’s brows rose. And as they did, Kaylin noticed—with the training she had excelled in—that the passersby in the street all seemed to slow, that their stalks, from different heights, perched upon different shades of hair, seemed to turn toward them. Or toward Epharim.

“Are we causing a scene?” she asked in low tones.

Epharim looked confused. Well, more confused. “A scene? Like in a play?”

“No. A scene, as in everyone in the street for miles stops to stare at us as if we’re insane.”

He blinked. Looked at the people who were—yes—staring at them, and then looked back at Kaylin. “This … is a scene?”

Severn stepped on her other foot.

“People don’t normally stop to stare like that.”

Again his brows rippled, this time toward the bridge of his straight, perfect nose. “They don’t?”

“No.”

“Then how are they expected to observe?”

“Observe what?”

“You. Corporal Severn Handred.”

“Severn will do,” Severn said. “It is our custom.”

“They’re not supposed to,” Kaylin replied, ignoring Severn. “They have other things to do, don’t they?”

“They have things to do,” Epharim agreed, still standing there, anchoring Kaylin in place while stragglers farther down also stopped walking and turned to look back. “But most of them have never seen one of your kind so close. They will remember,” he added, as if this was supposed to be a comfort. She had the momentary urge to pull out her beat stick and approach them with a smile that was about as soft as steel, telling them to move along.

But there were children there, their stalks slender, and to her surprise, almost transparent, their eyes wide and openly curious. Too far away to see her own reflection in those eyes, she knew then what she would want reflected, and the impulse left her. She turned slowly back to Epharim, who was beaming at her with an expression she now recognized—a childlike wonder so out of place on the face of a grown man she had failed to see it at first.

She had never seen Tha’alani children before. Never seen their babies, or their elderly, their youths; she had never held one, never ushered one, bloodied and crying, into the world; she had never been called upon by the guild of midwives to save a mother who would otherwise die at what should have been the start of a new life.

Then again, she had never been asked to lick natal fluid off the hair of a Tha’alani newborn, so maybe she should be grateful. She wasn’t, but that was the perverse nature of her universe. And as they stared at her, she stared at them, separated by yards of street and a gentle breeze. It was utterly silent.

One of the children—dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned, too young to be easily identified as either boy or girl—slid loose from his guardian’s grasp and toddled toward her, his stalks weaving in the air so awkwardly she wondered if they could be combed out when they got knotted. It was an idle thought, and it held no fear.

As the child approached, she thought him a boy, and knew that she could easily be wrong, but she had to think him one or the other because it was not a pronoun she ever applied to children.

He was smiling, and he had teeth, and his cheeks began to flush as he teetered in the precarious almost-fall that was a young child’s run. All of Kaylin’s self-consciousness melted in the warmth of that smile, and she knelt slowly, bringing herself as close to the ground—and to his approaching height—as she could while still maintaining any dignity.

He wore a blue-and-red robe, gaudy, bright colors that had a sheen that caught light, and gold around one wrist. She held out her arms without thought, and he chortled with glee. Had he been Leontine, he would have had milk teeth, and she would have been a tad more careful while holding out uncovered hands.

But he was Tha’alani, and almost human, and the stalks that had terrified her were almost literally knotting themselves as they twisted. The terror they held for her, perched on the forehead of older men with grim, shuttered faces, was gone.

She thought he might slow his approach, but the momentum of his trajectory carried him forward, faster and faster, until he was leaning toward the ground; she caught him before the stones did. Swept him up, her hands under his arms, and held his face across from hers, laughing, because she had to laugh. He was laughing.

And as he reached for her, his slender arms dimpled with baby fat that had not yet disappeared with height and age, she let out a small squeal of delight that easily matched his, and she hugged him.

The stalks on his forehead untwined and touched her face, soft as feathers, but slighter and more insistent. They brushed her cheeks, her mouth, her nose, as if they were his fingers, and then rose toward her forehead and hovered there, waiting.

After a moment, they touched her forehead.

She should have been frightened, but it was impossible to be frightened in the face of his open curiosity, his imperious delight, the smug sense of certainty that loved children everywhere show. If she were a danger to him, he couldn’t conceive of it, and she couldn’t, either.

And if he were a danger to her, then she had grown so paranoid and so pathetic that … But she couldn’t hold on to the thought. His stalks continued to bat against her forehead, and she realized that he was looking for hers.

“I don’t have them,” she told him gently, aware that she was confessing some inner fault. His smile faltered, and he looked at her face intently, his eyes wide. He hesitated a moment and then his stalks were moving again, this time more slowly; she could more feel than see them, because she was watching his expression. She thought he might be worried now, or afraid, because she was different, strange, unknown.

Instead, she felt a giddy delight and something else, the desire to be chased around in the open streets, the desire to laugh and to hide and be caught, over and over again. That and mild thirst. None of these were her feelings.

She glanced at Severn, who was watching her as intently as any of the Tha’alani in the tableau the street had become. She heard herself say, “He’s—he’s speaking to me ….”

The Tha’alani had never spoken to her, not this way. They had pried, poked, pulled at memories; they had forced her to see what they were seeing. But they had never exposed themselves as this child had just so joyfully done.

Would it have made a difference?

She set the child down and he ran away, and stopped, and looked back, waiting for her to follow, to chase him.

She looked back at Epharim for guidance, but found nothing there that would stop her or warn her; he had no fear at all for the child, and clearly no sense of impatience at the delay in escorting her to see Ybelline.

“His parents—” she said, touching her unadorned forehead. “They won’t mind?”

“Mind?”

But no parents magically appeared to scoop their wayward child back into the safety of their arms, to keep him from strangers such as Kaylin, and that was answer enough because the child was impatiently waiting to be followed now. She felt the words, rather than heard them. But she would have felt them from any child, of any race. She might have been a little more careful in the southern stretch, where wings were not yet strong enough to carry a child who chose to launch himself off the edge in mimicry of the adult Aerians, but here, a fall was just a fall.

She ran after him and his laughter filled the street, and it was joined by the laughter of literally dozens of other children as he ran past—other children, older and younger, and many of the adults. Like a multitude of voices sharing the same throat, the same joy, the same word.

She caught the child, knowing the game, and tickled him, lifting him and throwing him in the air, taking care to hold on to his armpits. And on the way down, she laughed, as well, and her laughter was asynchronous, out of step with the crowd.

But when she set the boy free and turned to face Severn and Epharim, she saw only joy in Epharim’s expression. No resignation, no sense of lost time, no judgment and no fear.

And this was the part of the city that had so terrified her that she wouldn’t even look down at it from the safety of the skies.

Epharim waited until she had joined them again and said softly, “You fear discovery. You fear your own thoughts.” And he said it with pity. Kaylin was not the world’s biggest pity fan. “Fear, we all know,” he added. “And we all know rejection and pain. But none of us have ever suffered this fear of being revealed, this fear of being seen as we are.” He was serene, and without judgment.

“The children will not sense this in you,” he added softly. “They are not so powerful yet, and they are children. If they know other thoughts, they can’t be bothered listening to the ones that don’t concern them.”

She nodded absently, wondering what it would be like to live an entire life in a world where every thought was known. Would it even be possible to lie? Would it ever occur to someone to try it? Would it be possible to love in secret, to desire the things you couldn’t have?

Would it be possible to kill?

Epharim said, “We are human,” but his tone was quiet. “And there are few of us who can enter your world and live with what we find there. Very few of you who could live in ours, and not be shocked or scandalized by what you would find here. We have very different ideas of what is natural, of what nature means.

“But the young are the young,” he added softly. “And the child will remember you, now.” He smiled and said, “I think he was shocked that you had no ahporae. Come. Ybelline is waiting.”

“You know that from here?”

He nodded. “She is not far, and she is very, very sensitive.”

“But she lives on the outside.”

“She lives here. She travels at the behest of the Emperor. But Dragons are not mortal, and their thoughts are so vast and so strange they are more comfortable for us in many ways.”

She wondered at a race that could find the presence of Dragons more comforting than the presence of humans.

“There is very little a Dragon fears,” Epharim said.

And she didn’t even resent the way he answered the things she hadn’t said aloud. Perhaps her time with Nightshade had prepared her for this. Or perhaps the child had given her a small key.

“Fear?”

He nodded.

“It’s the fear that’s bad?”

“It is the fear that is most common. We frighten your kind.”

She nodded, and with more force.

“Fear kills,” he told her quietly. “It maims and it kills. It twists and it breaks. And among your kind, fear is part of the foundations upon which you build all thought.” His face shuttered as he said this, and he looked at her with his pale eyes, his antennae drawn back and down across his hair. “It is why so few are chosen to go and be among your kind. It takes a special talent to dwell so long with your thoughts and not absorb them, becoming like you.”

Kaylin couldn’t even imagine a life without fear.

Ybelline’s dwelling was not small. It was a manor, but all of its surfaces were rounded; even the corners of the building bent gradually, and looked to Kaylin’s eye like a rectangle trying its best to imitate an oval, and not quite succeeding. It felt like stone to the touch, and she knew this because she did. But it was a brown that most stone didn’t go without effort.

There were windows along the curve of the wall, but no balcony. Doors, the only flat surface she could see. Instead of steps, there was a ramp that sloped up gradually. Epharim lead them toward it.

“You don’t have horses here?”

“There are horses where horses are needed,” he replied. “But we find oxen more pliable.”

“But they’re food!”

He said nothing, but it was the kind of nothing that promoted stillness.

The doors slid open—literally disappearing into either wall—as he approached. “Ybelline will be in the back,” he told her. “She’s expecting you.” He paused, and then added, “We understand your fear, Kaylin Neya. It is not entirely groundless. But if I have said we live without fear, I have not been entirely truthful. We fear your kind.”

She started to say something, managed to think the better of it before the words left her mouth, and said instead, “So do I.”

“Help us, if you can.”

Before she could ask him more, he turned and left them. Kaylin looked at Severn. Severn was quiet and remote. “What do you think is going on?” she asked softly.

“Nothing good.” He began to walk and Kaylin fell into step beside him. “You did well, out there.”

“Hmm?”

“With the child.”

“The—Oh.” She opened her mouth and he lifted a hand.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t do that on purpose.”

“But—”

“Because it doesn’t matter. Be yourself here. It’s enough.”

“I’m always myself,” she said, half-ruefully, thinking about Marcus and the Hawks.

“I know. I’ve watched you, remember?” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”

“He was a child.”

“I know. But—they were willing to touch you.”

“No one touched—”

“Your thoughts, at that moment. They all did.”

She hesitated; a momentary revulsion gripped her.

“They’re afraid of us with more reason than we fear them,” he told her quietly. “Study the Tha’alani. Those who walk among the deaf will come back injured, or insane—by their standards—if they go too often. They absorb our fear and our terrible isolation.

“We’re a race of insane people, to the Tha’alani. Think about it, Kaylin—a home where there can be no misunderstanding. Where all anger is known and faced instantly, and all fear is addressed and calmed. Where all love is known, and all desire is accepted.”

“Oh?” Kaylin said, after a moment. “Then why am I here today?”

Severn said quietly, “Bet you dinner that it has something to do with the deaf.”

“Meaning us.”

“Meaning our kind, yes.”

She thought about it for two seconds. It was a sucker bet, and she didn’t make those on the losing end. “No deal.”

His smile was brief and dark. It suited his face so perfectly, with all its nuance, that she realized he was right: it was not a smile she could even imagine on Epharim’s face.

Ybelline was waiting for them in a garden that was both sedate and seemed, at first, very simple. She sat at a table in the open air, and there were empty chairs around it—two empty chairs. Kaylin bowed briskly; Severn’s bow was extended. But genuine. He obviously knew Ybelline, and Ybelline’s graceful nod implied that she remembered him. They’d met before. Maybe they’d even worked together. Seven years, Severn had lived a life that Kaylin knew nothing about.

Did you see what I can’t see? she thought with a pang. Do you know what he won’t tell me?

As if in answer, Ybelline turned to Kaylin. But her antennae were flat against the honeyed gold of her hair, and her eyes were dark, a color that sunlight didn’t seem to penetrate. Kaylin had seen that color before in Tha’alani, but she wasn’t certain what it meant.

“Please,” Ybelline said, her voice rich and deep, but still slightly odd. “Be seated.”

They both obeyed her easy request as if it weren’t a thinly veiled command—and Ybelline was so gracious, it might not have been. She offered them tea, and like the color of her hair it was warm and honeyed. Severn drank without pause, although Kaylin knew he didn’t particularly like sweet in beverages. Kaylin, on the other hand, thought they should be desserts.

“What you did, Kaylin Neya, was good.”

Kaylin was confused.

“Ah, I meant with the son of Raseina. The boy. Epharim told me about it.” She did not smile as she spoke, but her tone conveyed gratitude. Which was odd. “You are fond of children,” she added, “and now, the collective knows this.”

Collective?

“The Tha’alaan,” Ybelline said, raising one brow. She looked at Severn, who was wincing. But she didn’t miss a beat, and her brow fell. “Your introduction to my kin was not a kind one. Perhaps not harsher than you deserved, but still, harrowing.”

Kaylin nodded at both statements.

“I have been gathering my own thoughts among my kin,” Ybelline continued, “and I would have conveyed what I felt in you the first time we met—but this was better. The child touched you—he is strong—and what he felt, the Tha’alaan felt. Your people believe in lies,” she added, “because they cannot hear truth.

“But there is no lie in that affection, although you fear us.”

“He’s a child—” Kaylin began.

“He is, but he will not always be a child, and many of your kind would fear him for what he might see, or how they might affect him with their fear and their secrets, the things they cannot help but hide. Hiding didn’t occur to you when he ran toward you.”

“It was a test?”

“No. Not a planned test, but perhaps the gods are kind.”

Kaylin had her doubts, and was aware that keeping them to herself around this woman was impossible. Then again, she generally didn’t keep that particular thought to herself, so no big loss.

But Severn said, before she could continue down that path, “Why was this fortunate, Ybelline? Why would it have been necessary to make such a statement to the Tha’alaan?”

Kaylin looked at Severn with surprise and a complete certainty that his question was actually one she should have been thinking.

“Yes,” Severn said, not bothering to spare her because, well, Ybelline would probably hear it anyway, “it was. But where children are concerned, you seem to forget simple things like thinking.”

Funny man. She thought about hitting him. Briefly.

Ybelline’s stalks rose and fell, as if thought itself were too heavy. She was silent for a long while, staring at Kaylin, and at Severn. Then she rose, leaving the table behind, and turned her back on them. Even among humans, this would not have been considered a good sign.

“You are very guarded,” Ybelline said to Severn. “And I choose to trust you without touching your inner thoughts.”

“And Kaylin isn’t.”

“No,” Ybelline said softly. “And I think she may have more that she feels needs to be hidden.”

Severn said nothing.

Kaylin froze for just a second. But Ybelline’s voice was so gentle, so free from censure, that the moment passed, and Kaylin let it go. She wanted to trust this woman. She had wanted to trust her the first time she’d laid eyes on her. Kaylin didn’t remember her mother very well—but something about Ybelline reminded her of that past. Never mind that the past was in the poverty of the fief of Nightshade.

Ybelline lifted her arms, wrapped them around herself. Kaylin could see her fingers trembling in the still air, the warm sun. “We need you to help us,” she said quietly.

With anything came to mind, but didn’t leave Kaylin’s lips. Of course, the fact that this didn’t matter occurred to her only after she’d successfully bit back the words; they were so loud.

“One of our children is missing.”

CHAPTER
4

Missing.

The word was heavy. It opened between them like a chasm created by the breaking of earth in the aftermath of magic. Kaylin did not look at Severn, but she was aware that he was watching her. Not staring, not exactly, but aware of her reaction. She schooled her expression—a phrase she hated—with care, entirely for his benefit.

“You haven’t reported her as missing.” Not a question.

“No,” Ybelline said, and she almost shuddered. Did, although it was subtle, a ripple that passed through her and left her changed.

“You don’t believe that she just wandered out of the quarter on her own.” Flat words.

“No,” Ybelline replied.

Which made sense. The young child Kaylin had so unselfconsciously lifted had had the attention of everyone in the street simply because he wanted it, and the adults were happy to indulge the simple desire of someone who was certain he was loved. Any child, Kaylin thought, would have that certainty, among the Tha’alani. She felt a pang as she thought of the orphans in the Foundling Halls, Marrin’s kits. They had never been certain of that.

Kaylin stepped back, but not physically. She was a Hawk, and reminded herself that that was what she had chosen to be. And a Hawk asked questions, sought answers, sifted through facts. No matter how much they dreaded them.

“What happened?” she asked, not bothering to hide that dread.

Ybelline did not close her eyes as she turned back to them, and her eyes were dark. The color, Kaylin thought, of either sorrow or horror. She still wasn’t sure.

“She was not at her home,” Ybelline began. “Understand that we have a … looser sense of home … than your kin. We are aware of where our children are, and we watch them, as a community. We listen for them. We hear their pain or their fear, and any one of us—any—will come to their rescue if rescue is required.

“Mayalee is a wanderer,” she added. “A young explorer. And she is fond of night, and stars, and navigation. She is bold—” The words stopped for a moment. “She is afraid of very little. Not even heights or falling.

“And none of our children—in the Tha’alaan—are afraid of strangers. We have no word for it,” she added, “that does not mean outsider. And no outsiders come here.”

“You think one did.”

“One must have,” Ybelline said bitterly. But something was not right, something about the words hinted at evasion. Kaylin looked at Severn to see if he had noticed, but she read nothing on his face, nothing in his expression. He was, as Ybelline had said, careful.

Kaylin was not. “You’re not certain it was an outsider,” she said at last.

Ybelline raised a golden brow.

“Epharim said—he mentioned—that we define insane, for your kin. My kin,” she added, “and I won’t argue the definition. He might be right. I’ve often thought—”

“Kaylin, topic,” Severn said curtly.

“Right. If insanity can be defined, it means there are, among your kin, those who are insane.”

“The deaf,” Ybelline said, and there was pity in her voice. “Those that are born deaf. Those that become deaf through injury.”

Kaylin nodded.

“It is like losing the ability to speak,” Ybelline added, “and to hear. And to touch. And to walk. It is all of those things, at once. It is the loss of kin. Many do not survive it.”

“And those that do?”

“They are our kin,” she replied, “and we care for them as we can. They have no place in your world. They are of the Tha’alaan even if they can no longer perceive it.”

Kaylin nodded. “What happened?” she asked again, but this time her voice was gentle.

“Mayalee is five years old, by your reckoning. She is still in all ways a child, by ours. She is aware of the Tha’alaan, and the Tha’alaan is aware of her.

“She was out, near the roof gardens of the center. It was late, and the moons were full—it was just after your Festival. She likes the Festival,” she added softly, “and although we forbid it to our kin, some of the magefire that lights the sky can be seen clearly from the terrace.

“So she went there, to watch.

“After a time, she climbed down, and she headed toward the guardhouse wards. She is such a clever child,” Ybelline added, and the affection was swamped with regret and fear—and a certain sense of failure.

Profound failure.

“She was not afraid, simply determined. Her aunt—I think you would use that word—headed out to find her. But before they reached her she met someone.

“A man,” she added. “He was not in the Tha’alaan, but Mayalee was not afraid of him. Not immediately.”

“And she went with him?”

“She went with him. Her uncles came, then, and her mother,” Ybelline added. “I was on call to the Emperor at the time, or I would have heard her.”

“How far away can you hear your kin?”

“I? A great distance. But it depends entirely upon the individual. Some of us can reach far, and some can touch only the heart of the Tha’alaan.

“She was afraid, when she left our quarter. She did not want to leave. She told us this much—but not more. We could not clearly see the man she saw,” she added. “And this—”

“Magic?”

“We fear magic,” Ybelline replied. “But it is worse—she began to tell us something and then—she screamed.” Ybelline closed her eyes. “She screamed. It was the last thing we heard of her—that scream. She is no longer in reach of the Tha’alaan.”

“She was taken that quickly?”

“That is our hope,” Ybelline said, but there was little hope in the words.

Kaylin was confused. Severn rose. “You think she was crippled,” he said quietly.

“We fear it,” Ybelline replied. “We fear that they damaged her somehow, to break the contact. Those who are powerful can sense each other—but even the weak can touch the Tha’alaan at all times.”

“But they could have just knocked her out, couldn’t they?”

“No. Not conventionally.” It was Severn who replied. “The Tha’alani would be aware of her, even were she sleeping.”

“But how—” Kaylin bit back the question. “Her stalks. Her antennae.”

Ybelline nodded, and this time, her face showed open fear.

They were silent for a time. Even for Kaylin, who had dreaded the Tha’alani for almost half her life, the sense of horror was genuine. It was as if she had been told someone had blinded a child to stop the child from identifying where she was being held captive.

“Why have you not approached the Halls of Law, Ybelline?” Severn again. Kaylin let him take over the questioning because he was so calm, his voice so soft, facts somehow seemed less threatening.

“We are not certain that it is a matter for the Common Law,” Ybelline replied carefully.

“You cannot think one of your own—” He stopped. “One of the deaf.”

“It is possible,” Ybelline replied. “One is missing.”

“How long?”

“We cannot be certain—but he was not to be found after Mayalee disappeared. She would not fear him,” Ybelline added. “She might pity him, but she would not fear him.”

“I’m sorry,” Severn told her. “I wasn’t clear. How long has he been deaf?”

“Almost all of his life.”

“And he has lived here?”

She was silent for a time. “When he reached the age of maturity, and the madness was upon him, the Tha’alaan itself could not reach him, as it reaches those who are not—deaf. He … injured himself. And he left the Tha’alaan, searching for his own kind, as he called you.”

“He injured himself.”

“He cut off what he referred to as useless appendages,” she said carefully. “And bound his head with warrior markings, so that the wounds might go undetected. I think he truly felt that among your kin, he would find peace and acceptance.”

“He wasn’t accepted here.” Kaylin’s words were flat.

“He was, Kaylin,” Ybelline replied, just a hint of anger in the words. “And he was loved. We would no more turn our backs upon our own children than you would turn your backs upon one born blind or silent.

“But he felt the separation keenly at that time, and nothing we could say or do would dissuade him. We are not jailers,” she added bitterly. “And in the end, it was decided that he might, indeed, find truth among your kind.”

“But if he was living here—”

“Our world and your world are different,” Ybelline replied. “And fear is so much a part of yours. He would be considered—would have been—childlike and naive by your kin. By you,” she added. “He was not the same when he finally returned to us. He was silent, and he smiled little. He was injured,” she added, “but we did not ask him by what, or how. He did not desire us to know.

“He was ashamed, I think,” she added softly, “and that is almost foreign to us. He recovered here. He spent time with his friends and his kin.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Six months.”

Six months, Kaylin thought. Six months could be such a long time. You could learn so much in those months. Or so little, she thought ruefully, remembering her months on idle behind a school desk in the Halls of Law.

“Yes,” Ybelline said, looking at Kaylin’s face carefully. “He learned, we think, to lie. To smile when he was unhappy. To be silent when he yearned to scream. More,” she added. “But it hurt us, and we did not press him.” She looked away. “Were you of my kin,” she whispered, “you would know how much of a failure that was—we, who know everything, did not attempt to learn, to seek his truth.”

“But if he didn’t want you prying—”

“You think like a human.”

“Hello. My name is Kaylin. The last time I looked—”

Severn stepped on her foot beneath the table. Hard.

“You seek privacy because you fear discovery,” Ybelline told her. “And in the end? We let him be like you. We did not want to touch his fear, and draw it into the Tha’alaan. He chose to be isolated, and we let him.”

Kaylin understood by the tone of Ybelline’s words just how guilty she felt—but she couldn’t see why. So she did what she could as a Hawk, instead; she had nothing to offer the woman otherwise. “Where was he last seen?”

“His mother saw him,” she said quietly, “and those of his friends he chose to keep company with.”

“Was he behaving differently?”

“How were they to know? He is like your Severn in his ability to hide from us.”

“Can we speak with these friends?”

She hesitated. “They are younger than I,” she said at last. “Your age, perhaps slightly older.”

“So?”

Ybelline turned to Severn.

Severn nodded. “We are not here, I think, in official capacity. I doubt the Hawks would allow Kaylin into the Tha’alaan as a representative in any case. Her dislike and her fear are well known.”

Ybelline said, “It is a deep fear, but it is a narrow one. There are things she fears more, and in the end, things she loves more. I am willing to trust her. Are you?”

Severn nodded. “With my life,” he said, an odd smile on his lips. “She’s not noted for being all that careful with her own, however.” He rose and approached Ybelline, his back toward Kaylin. “Show me,” he said quietly. “Show me who his friends are, and where we might find them.”

Kaylin rose, as well, moving slightly, so she could see them in profile. Could watch Ybelline lift her face, could see the fluttery movement of her dreaded antennae as they brushed the surface of Severn’s forehead in a light caress.

Kaylin shuddered, but Severn merely closed his eyes and nodded. There were whole days where she didn’t understand him. And there were days like this—where even the thought of understanding him seemed impossible.

“All right, you win.”

“We didn’t have a bet here.”

“What exactly is the Tha’alaan?”

“It’s their community,” he said slowly. “Their … living history. No, it’s more than that—it’s like a thought they all share, whenever they choose to touch it. The Tha’alani individually have exceptional memories of their personal experiences, and they share these. They share what they’ve felt. They can almost relive it, and in doing that, the community relives it. The Tha’alaan is like a collection of all their experience, past and present, living and dead, all their hopes, and all their fears.”

“I thought they didn’t have any.”

He raised a brow. “Anything alive knows fear. Ybelline is terrified now, and she is under some strain. She keeps much from the Tha’alaan and that is costly. Were she not trained for service to the outside—were she not schooled in handling the deaf, as we’re called—she would not be able to master her thoughts in this fashion.

“Not all the Tha’alani can. Some have aptitude, and those are trained and tested. Those powerful enough, they surrender for a time to the Emperor’s service.”

“Or to anyone who can pay?”

“No, Kaylin. There are perhaps one or two in the history of their kind who have chosen to work for the deaf, but they are the exception that proves the rule. Most of the Tha’alani would live forever in their own world, seeking no contact with any outsiders, were it not for the Emperor’s dictate.”

“They don’t want to do—what they do.”

“No.”

“But they do it.”

“Yes. Those who can. They rotate service—the length of time they can work outside of the Tha’alaan differs from person to person.” He paused. “Ybelline is very strong. Strong enough to be gentle,” he added quietly. “She doesn’t pity us, and she doesn’t fear us. She half understands.”

“She can … keep her experience of our world to herself.”

“Exactly.”

“So it doesn’t pollute the hive mind.”

He frowned. “They’re not insects, Kaylin. But yes, there are experiences that they would never otherwise have, and only those who can live with the isolation of individual experience can serve. It is very, very hard for the Tha’alani.”

They had no escort as they emerged from the large, rounded dwelling. Epharim was gone, and no one in armor stood ready to take his place. Kaylin was nonplussed. “She chose to let us walk here,” Severn told her.

“She didn’t seem to worry about you.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We’ve met before,” he replied carefully. Where carefully meant completely neutrally in that don’t-ask-me-questions way. “I am not, perhaps, the ideal person from whom to draw information, but neither was I afraid of her, or her kin. They can’t create memories,” he added. “They can’t erase them. And what happened, happened.”

“I’m not proud of a lot of my ‘what happeneds,’” Kaylin said in a quiet voice. “If I wanted people to know, I’d tell them.”

“That is a luxury,” he told her as he continued to walk. “And a daydream. Learn to care less about what other people think.”

“I don’t want my life paraded through the office like yesterday’s gossip.”

“It already is yesterday’s gossip.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do. I don’t agree with you, but I do know what you mean. We don’t have privacy, Kaylin. We have the illusion of privacy. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And we have no secrets?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t want my children to know—to know about things that I’ve done.” She thought of the Foundling Halls, and the children she visited there. Shuddered to think of how much it would hurt them to know what she was capable of.

“That, I understand. Children are very absolute in their judgment. Do you truly think she would tell them?”

“Not her.”

“And the others?”

Kaylin cursed in Leontine. “Not them. But the people they inform—”

“Would you change your past?”

“Parts of it. In a heartbeat.”

He shrugged again.

“You wouldn’t?”

“I can’t. I don’t waste time thinking about changing what can’t be changed.”

“And you’re never afraid that someone will judge you? That they won’t misunderstand you or misconstrue you as you are now?”

“People judge me all the time. Be careful of that,” he added, pointing at a trellis that grew near the roadside. Vines were wrapped around it, and they rustled in the nonexistent breeze.

“But they don’t have the right—”

“They have the right to form their own opinions. I have the right to disagree with them in a fashion that doesn’t break the Imperial Laws.”

“But—”

“I’m not afraid of the judgment of strangers,” he told her quietly. “I live with my own judgment. That’s enough. And I judge others, and live by those judgments, as well.”

“I don’t—” want to be despised or hated. She couldn’t quite frame the words with her lips, they sounded so pathetic as a thought.

But Severn had her name; she felt it tug between them, its foreign syllables not so much a sound as a texture. Ellariayn.

He stopped walking and caught her face in his hands, pulling it up. She met his eyes. “Then stop despising and hating yourself, Kaylin. We’re not what we were. We’re not what we will be. Everyone changes. Everyone can change. Let it go.

“If you are always afraid to be known, you will never understand anyone else. If you never understand anyone else, you’ll never be a good Hawk. You’ll see what others see, or what they want you to see. You won’t see what’s there.”

She pulled herself free. Said, thickly, “Let’s go find these friends.”

Because he was Severn, he let her wander around in circles before she realized that she had no idea where those friends were. Because she was Kaylin, it took another fifteen minutes before she asked him where they were going. He didn’t laugh. Exactly. And she didn’t hit him, exactly.

But she watched the streets unfold as she walked, half-lost, in this section of the huge city of her birth that she’d never willingly visited before today. Saw the neatly tended houses, the profusion of green that seemed to be a small jungle around the rounded domes. If there was order to it, it wasn’t the kind of order that the human nobility favored; each garden—if that was the right word—was its own small wilderness.

Every so often she could see one of the Tha’alani, dressed in a summer smock that seemed so normal it looked out of place, kneeling on the ground, entwined by vines and flowers. They were working, watering, tending; they didn’t even look up as she and Severn passed.

The children often did, and one or two of them waved, jumping up and down to catch her attention. She had the impression of chatter and noise, but they were almost silent, and their little antennae waved in time with their energetic, stubby hands. They were curious, she thought, but they weren’t in any way afraid. And they were happy.

She waved back. Severn didn’t. But he walked more slowly, and as he did, the nature of the streets changed, widening as they walked. The greenery grew sparser—if things that grew could be sparse in this place—and the buildings grew larger, although they never lost their rounded curves. Street lamps, guttered by sun, stretched upward along the roadside; even the Tha’alani couldn’t see in the dark, it seemed.

“Where are we going? The market?”

He nodded slowly. “The market is there,” he said.

She recognized evasion when she heard it. But she was now curious herself; markets were markets, but the streets here were not so crowded as the streets surrounding any of the city markets on her beat.

There were children here, as well, but here there were fences. They were short, often colored by clean paint, and obviously meant as decoration and not protection; the children were almost as tall as the fences, and could be seen poking arms through them and touching leaves or petals. Adults came and went, and it was hard to attach any particular child to any of the adults who walked or milled around the street in silence.

And that was the thing that was strangest to her: It was eerily silent, here. Once or twice the children cried out in glee or annoyance, and the adults would murmur something just out of audible range—but there was no shouting, no background voices, nothing that wasn’t the movement of feet against the cobbled ground.

For the first time, Kaylin understood why she was referred to as deaf by the Tha’alani; she felt it, here. The deafness, the odd isolation her need for the spoken word produced.

“Where’s the market?” she asked Severn, to break the silence, to hear the sound of words.

“Beyond the lattice,” he replied, and pointed.

Fountains blossomed like flowers with water for petals and leaves of intricately carved stones. The slender spires of water that reached for the sky seemed almost magical to Kaylin as she stared at them. Small children were playing at their edges, and squealing as the water fell down again. No language was needed to understand the urgency of their pointing little hands, or perhaps all languages encompassed it.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Severn replied, using that voice again.

“Who were you hunting?”

“Someone who understood the Tha’alani geography, but not the Tha’alani themselves,” he replied. “It didn’t take long to find him.”

She knew better than to ask what had happened to the man once they’d found him. Severn had probably already said too much.

Kaylin approached the fountains that were spread out on the points of an invisible grid. She dodged a running child, and avoided a spray of misaimed water or two. The fountains here clearly did not hold the invisible Do Not Touch signs that the fountains in the rest of the city did.

In fact, nothing seemed to.

Do not touch also did not extend to do not wade, and several of the children who were too old to be called little and to little to be thought of as anything else were thoroughly soaked—or entirely naked—in the low rise of the water. They made the noise that the rest of the streets seemed to lack, and Kaylin gravitated toward them, promising to never again curse the sound of voices. Even when she was hungover.

But she stopped short because it wasn’t only children who were making themselves at home in the water. Severn bumped into her back at her abrupt halt.

Entwined, legs tangled, half sitting, half covered in the shallow water, were two Tha’alani who were obviously, but quietly, making love.

But the children played around them, sometimes over them, in their mad scramble to catch falling water; one or two of them had stopped to stare for a moment, and were still staring, but not the way Kaylin was. If her jaw hadn’t been attached to her face it would be bouncing across the slick stones. She managed to control the urge to grab one of the children who was watching and haul him to safety.

Barely.

But there were other adults here, and they seemed entirely unconcerned. They barely seemed to notice, and this was almost as shocking as watching the couple themselves, skin water-perfect as they moved. Their eyes were closed, and their stalks intertwined; they were blissfully unaware of the world around them.

Kaylin teetered on the edge of action for a moment, and then began to walk forward toward them, half-embarrassed and half-outraged. Severn caught her upper arm.

“Don’t,” he said very quietly into her ear. “It’s considered rude.”

“Stopping them from—from—there are children here, Severn!”

“Stopping them from expressing their love and desire. Yes. It’s considered intrusive here.”

“But—but—” she spluttered as if she were the one who was half drowning. “The children—”

“The children are aware of them,” he said. “And as you can see, they are not concerned. They haven’t yet learned not to attempt to disturb, but that’s expected of children.” He paused, and then said, “No, Kaylin, they have no shame.” But the tone of the words conveyed no contempt and no horror, no shock, no judgment.

Certainly no embarrassment.

“They want what they want. They are aware of it in the Tha’alaan from the moment they touch it. They love as they love, and it is considered as natural as breathing, or eating, or sleeping. They make love without fear of exposure because in some ways there is no privacy. The thought and the impulse is extreme, and it is felt regardless of where they are.

“But it isn’t condemned,” he told her. “Not by them.”

“But—”

“This is the other reason why the deaf are seldom allowed entry into the enclave. No race, not even the Barrani, can understand the total lack of possessiveness that this entails.”

“It doesn’t—doesn’t bother you?”

“No. But I couldn’t live with it, either. They are not lovers in the way we would use the word. They have no marriage, no fidelity, no sense of ownership or commitment. They feel no jealousy,” he added, “or if they do, it is minor. It does not drive them to acts of rage or despair.

“They have no privacy because they don’t need it.”

Kaylin shook her head, almost compelled to watch, and uncomfortable in the extreme with the compulsion. A world with no privacy? It would be like hell. But worse. She could never escape—

Escape what?

“Do they never get angry?”

“Oh, they can.”

“Do they never dislike each other?”

“Possibly,” he said. “I’ve never seen it, but I can’t imagine it never happens. They are not all of the same mind.”

“But they can’t hide it?”

“No. They don’t try.” He drew a sharp breath, and she knew that despite his composure he was not unaffected. “But so many disagreements between people occur because they simply don’t understand each other. Or they cannot see a viewpoint that isn’t their own.

“The Tha’alani never suffer from that. They understand each other perfectly. Or as perfectly as I think it’s possible to understand another person. They don’t get trapped by words. They don’t interpret them differently. They can’t lie to each other. And even if they could, they have no reason to. A lie is a thing we tell to hide something—and they cannot hide from each other.

“Love, hatred, fear, insecurity—all of these things have been felt before, and will be felt again, and all of them are part of the Tha’alaan. Long before pain festers or breaks someone, it is felt, addressed, uprooted.

“At least that is my understanding.”

Kaylin looked at Severn, at his expression. After a moment she said, “You really like these people, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “They’re almost entirely innocent, Kaylin. But I couldn’t live among them.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not. Because even understanding them, I could not live as they live. I know why you fear them. But between the two of us, you could live more easily in the Tha’alaan than I, in the end. What I want isn’t part of their world.” He turned and met her gaze, and his lips turned up in an edged half smile. “I don’t like to share.”

She almost took a step back. “We should go,” she said, her voice low.

His smile broadened, but it lost the edge, changing the lines of his face. “Unfortunately,” he said, “we can’t.”

“Don’t tell me—” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“These are the two we want to speak with.”

It was several long, embarrassing minutes later. Maybe even half an hour. Kaylin hid it—if it was possible—by engaging the children who were tugging at her legs with their wet little hands. She joined them in their fountains, assiduously avoiding line of sight with the couple; she couldn’t actually watch them without feeling as if she’d accidentally walked into someone’s bedroom. Or worse.

And explaining why she felt this way was not high on her list of priorities. Explaining why their nudity was embarrassing, explaining why public lovemaking was unacceptable behavior in the rest of the city—the words came and went, and she knew they would make no sense to these people.

They made so little sense to Kaylin.

But eventually Severn demanded her attention. He didn’t speak. It was as if the Tha’alaan had seeped into his expression. He tugged at her name, at the shape of it, and she felt him suddenly, was aware of the way he was watching her, was even aware that he had been watching her the entire time she had been playing with small, gleeful strangers.

She hoped the two lovers had gotten dressed. She didn’t fancy her chances of normal questioning if they didn’t; they were young, and they were sun-bronzed and almost perfect. They were so wrapped up in each other—both literally and figuratively—that she wanted to go away and come back some other day.

But a child was missing.

And missing as well was a Tha’alani who was both deaf, and who had spent six months living in Kaylin’s world. She felt a pang of something like pity for him, for someone who had grown up among people who were guileless and sympathetic to everything. The world outside must have come as a shock to him. Or worse.

Had he kidnapped the child?

Was the child in some way the child she had seen in the depths of the water in the back of a shop that was far too small to contain what it did, in fact, contain? She didn’t think so; there had been no evidence of antennae, no evidence of the scabbing and bleeding that would no doubt be the result of their removal. And the child in the water was older.

Severn was standing by the couple when she at last emerged from the water, disengaging very small fingers from her waterlogged pants. It was warm enough that she had chosen to forgo leather for comfort, and she was damn glad of it. It didn’t wear well in water.

They had, indeed, donned clothing, and if they were still wet, their hair plastered to skin and neck, their antennae weaving as if they were drunk, they wore loose robes that must have taken yards of material to make. Not dark colors, in this sun, but pale blues and greens.

“Kaylin,” Severn said, speaking Elantran. “This is Nevaron, and this is Onnay.” He pointed first at the male, and then at the female. “The man that we seek is Grethan, and they have been friends for a long time.”

His words sounded out of place, so few other voices could be heard. But she nodded, attempting to regain her composure. It was easier than she had expected; they were calm and happy and completely free from either guilt or fear. They had not been discovered; no parent would be festering in fury.

They just … were.

And they were, to Kaylin’s eye, almost beautiful because of it, which she hadn’t expected. They were perhaps a year or two younger than her. It was hard to tell. They might easily have been a couple of years older.

But they would never know her life, and instead of resenting them, she felt strangely peaceful. Embarrassment faded, and she let it go, showing it out the figurative door as quickly and cleanly as possible.

“Ybelline sent us here,” Severn said quietly, “so that we might ask you a few questions about Grethan.”

Their stalks moved toward each other, touching slightly; they did not exchange a glance. Then again, they probably didn’t have to. The touch would give them room to say anything they wanted.

“We haven’t seen Grethan for two or three days,” the young woman said. Her words were oddly accented—and Kaylin realized, listening to them, that it wasn’t so much the accent as the enunciation; they pronounced each syllable slowly and carefully, as if speech were both new and foreign. Which, of course, it would be.

“When you last saw him, was he unhappy?”

“Grethan is always unhappy,” Onnay said quietly. “We can touch him,” she added, “and we can feel what he feels, and he allows this—but he cannot do likewise for us. We can speak to him when we touch him, but it is … invasive.” She dared a glance at Kaylin.

Kaylin nodded quietly.

“He did not allow us to touch him,” Nevaron said, after a pause. “Not in the last day or two. There were very few whom he would allow even that contact before then, and we accept this. It has happened before,” he added. “And it will no doubt happen again.”

“He is not in the Tha’alani quarter.”

Onnay’s brows rose. “What do you mean?” she said, each syllable still perfect, still slow.

“He is not at his home. He is not in the market. He is not where we believe he works.”

As they hadn’t actually done any of the legwork to ascertain this, Kaylin guessed that Ybelline had communicated this information to Severn when she had almost caressed his forehead with her antennae.

“We believe,” Kaylin said, speaking almost as slowly as they did, as if they were children, “that he has left the quarter and found a home outside of it.”

“With the deaf?”

“With, as you say, the deaf.”

Onnay shook her head forcefully. “That’s not possible,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“He lived there some time.”

“We are aware of this.”

“And he came back—” She shook her head. “He lived a nightmare there. Here, he could wake and be at peace. He was happy to be home,” she said. “And we were happy to see him return.

“He shared some of his life on the outside with us.” She could not suppress her shudder, and didn’t even bother to try. “And it hurt us,” she whispered. “We did not ask him to share all. I do not think—”

Nevaron shook his head. “It was not easy for him to share, and it was not easy for us. Onnay did not touch him, that day. I did.” He lifted his chin slightly. “I am of the Tha’alanari.”

“You will find work on the outside,” Severn said quietly. It was not a question.

“Even so.”

Severn nodded. “And you kept much of this from the Tha’alaan?”

“They would be—what is the word?—darkened by it.”

Severn nodded again. “In the memories that you touched,” he said softly, “were there no happy ones?”

“None that I would call happy, if I understand the Elantran word correctly.”

“And he met no one, found no one, that he might consider a friend?”

“Friend,” Onnay said, and looked at Nevaron.

“It is an Elantran word,” he replied, carefully and politely. “Ybelline sent them,” he added. “It means people who care.”

“Then we are all his friends.”

Nevaron’s antennae danced away from Onnay’s for a moment and her brows lifted. She smacked his chest. Kaylin laughed. “My apologies,” Nevaron said gravely, “but Onnay doesn’t pay much attention to racial differences.”

“Well, it isn’t as if I will go Outside.” Onnay frowned.

Kaylin laughed again. “Oh, Onnay,” she said, at the girl’s quizzical look, “no one ever really knows what they’ll be doing until they’re in the middle of it.”

“And the Tha’alaan contains very little about Outsiders,” she continued, obviously still annoyed.

“True,” Severn said, before Nevaron could dig himself into a deeper ditch. “But if he has left the quarter, he must have had some destination in mind.”

Nevaron hesitated for a moment longer, and then said, “I can show you where.” And Severn, as if he did this every bloody day, bowed his head and bent his face down so that it was within reach of Nevaron’s antennae.

He stiffened suddenly, but did not withdraw, and Kaylin could see, in the clear lines of Nevaron’s expression, some shock. “You know this place?” he asked, his voice low.

Severn’s brief chuckle was so dark, Kaylin knew instantly what the answer would be.

“Yes,” he said quietly. He turned to Kaylin, and his expression gave her no hope at all.

“Nightshade,” she said softly.

“The fief, yes,” Severn replied. And then, after a moment, added, “And the fieflord, Kaylin.”

CHAPTER
5

Kaylin was silent on the walk home. She didn’t even try to lead; she followed Severn as if she were his shadow, a part of his movement, impossible to separate from it.

“Kaylin?”

She shook her head. “I’ll go,” she said quietly.

“Alone?”

“I think it—I think so.”

“I despise the fieflord,” Severn said in a flat and neutral tone, “but his taste has never run toward the mutilation of children. Not her age.” He paused, and then added, as if it were dragged from him and he was unwilling to let it go, “I do not think, even if it did, that he would pursue it while you lived. There are some things that you do not forget.”

“Did Nevaron give you all of Grethan’s memory?” She felt almost dirty asking. Like a gossip, but worse. And she hated herself for it; she was doing what she herself feared might be done to her. Hypocrisy and Kaylin were not close friends.

“No,” Severn replied. “It was not his to give. He is Tha’alanari. He understands why barriers must be placed, and where.”

She nodded. The answer was both a frustration and a comfort. “Just an image?”

“More than an image, but not a whole story,” he replied. “The image of Mayalee is not the same as the description of the girl you saw in Evanton’s … shop. I do not think they are the same child,” he added, “although neither have been reported as missing. As neither have been officially reported,” he added quietly, “I’m not sure we’ll be allowed to officially investigate, either.”

She nodded absently. “Subsection of the human rights code v.8 states clearly that—”

“Those who are incapable of stating a case are still protected by the dictates of law.”

“It was meant to make provisions for—”

“Abused children, or those sold to brothels by their parents, often for transport to the fiefs.”

“You’re good,” she said with a half smile.

“As are you, which is probably more surprising given your general academic history.” His smile was fleeting, but genuine. “But the first case almost certainly involves magic.”

“And the second?”

“It involves Nightshade,” Severn said quietly. “What do you think?”

“Magic.” She said the two syllables with the emphasis she usually reserved for Leontine cursing. “Gods, I hate magic.”

“Don’t start, Kaylin.”

“All right. I won’t.”

“And speaking of magic—”

“Yes, damn it, I know.”

“You’re late.”

“Did I not just say I know that?”

“Have you ever been on time for one of your lessons?”

“Once. I think it almost gave Sanabalis a heart attack. If,” she added darkly, “Dragon lords have hearts.”

“I believe they have four.”

“Probably because they ate three.” She started to run because Severn had begun to jog.

“I have a few questions to ask the sergeant,” Severn said. “I’ll meet you after you’ve finished.”

Lord Sanabalis of the Dragon court had that aura of aged wisdom that had not yet declined into dotage. She found him both comforting and frightening—but then again, she’d seen a Dragon in its serpent form, so that was understandable.

He was also, in his own way, kind. The day she had been on time, he had been late. In fact he had taken to arriving about half an hour to an hour later than their scheduled appointment, probably to put Marcus at ease. It was not something she thought other Dragons would do; even Tiamaris, technically still seconded to the Hawks, would not have condescended to show that much consideration for the merely mortal.

Especially not when it was Marcus.

Today, Sanabalis was waiting for her in the West room, in the chair he habitually occupied. It was the largest chair in the office, and it was made of something so hard you could probably have carved swords out of it and they would still have maintained a killing edge.

Dragons were not exactly light.

She bowed when she entered the room, her hair askew. She had, as usual, flown through the office at a run, and paused only to let Caitlin fuss a bit.

But she sagged slightly when she saw her nemesis sitting on the table: a pale candle with an unlit wick. Grimacing, she took her seat opposite Sanabalis.

“Good of you to come,” he said. This was code for I’ve been waiting half an hour. She had thought she would only be half an hour late, and revised that estimate up by about thirty minutes.

“I was delayed,” she said carefully, “by a request from Ybelline of the—”

He lifted a hand. “It is not my concern.”

He waved toward the candle, and Kaylin said, without thinking, “Instead of trying to get me to understand the shape of fire, can you teach me the shape of water?”

His utter silence was almost profound, and his eyes had shifted from calm, placid gold to something that was tinged slightly orange. Red was the color of death in Dragon eyes.

Orange just meant they might pull an arm off for fun.

“It is very interesting that you should ask that, Kaylin. You will of course amuse an old man by telling him why.”

Kicking herself was not much fun, but she did it anyway. “It’s—”

His eyes shifted shades. His inner lids began to fall. Certainly made his eyes a more vibrant color. “Why water, Kaylin? Why now?”

Because she was either brave or stupid, she said, “Why do you care so much?” She didn’t tilt back in her chair; she couldn’t affect that much nonchalance in the face of a concerned—she liked that word—Dragon lord. But she did try.

It wasn’t the answer he was expecting. She could tell by the way he blinked; the last few weeks had given her that much. “Water is pervasive,” he said at last, and his eyes had shaded back to gold, but it was a bright and fiery gold, unlike the normal calm of Dragon eyes. Too keen, and too shiny.

“All of the elements—and that is a crude word, Kaylin, and it conveys almost nothing of their essence—have faces. They are death, if you discern that shape, but they are life, if you discern others.”

She thought of the shape of fire. Looked at the candle. It wasn’t life or death she had been struggling with. It was just lighting a damn wick. “Fire burns,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“And without it, we die in the cold, if we’re unlucky enough to live there.”

“Yes.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to explain it, are you?”

“No. But I am not unpleased, Kaylin.”

“Why is that, exactly?” She didn’t often say something right to her teachers, and she thought it might be useful if she ever wanted it to happen a second time.

“Water,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”

She knew she was chewing on her lower lip. “Well,” she said at last, “you can drown in it.”

“Yes.”

“And the storms at sea—”

“Yes.”

“But if you don’t drink it, you die.”

“Very good.”

“And so do the plants, in a draught.”

“Indeed.”

“And there’s more.” But this wasn’t a question. Water is deep. “Water is deep,” she said, musing aloud.

“Yes. Those are the words of the Keeper.”

“The who?”

“You met with him today,” Sanabalis added softly.

“Oh. You mean Evanton?”

His brow rose at the tone of her voice.

“Well, he’s just an old—” And fell again as her voice trailed off, remembering him in his elemental garden.

“He was one of my students,” Sanabalis said quietly, “but he does not visit, and cannot.” He looked at her carefully. “He showed you his responsibility.”

She nodded slowly.

“And you saw something in the water there.”

She nodded again. “A girl,” she said quietly. “Bruised face. Dark hair. Wide eyes. She called me by name,” she added softly.

“Did you recognize her?” His gaze was keen now, sharp enough to cut. Had she been a liar, she would have fallen silent, afraid to test that edge. But she was Kaylin.

“No. But I—I need to find her, Sanabalis.”

“Yes,” he told her softly. Where in this case soft was like the rumble of an earthquake giving its only warning.

“You know about this.”

“I don’t, Kaylin. Or I did not. But water—it is the element of the living. It is the element to which we are most strongly tied, or to which you and your kind are. It is the element that speaks most strongly to the Oracles.”

Kaylin failed entirely to keep from grimacing.

“You disdain the Oracles?”

“They speak in riddles when they speak at all, and afterward, they tell you that whatever gibberish they said was of course true.”

“It is only afterward that the contexts of the words have their full meaning,” he replied patiently.

She stopped. “You’ve been talking to the Oracles?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The Emperor desired it,” he replied, carefully and slowly. “And in truth, they came to him, and they were ill at ease.”

“How ill?”

“Perhaps a week ago, perhaps a little more, they were woken from their sleep by a dream.”

“All of them?”

“All of them. Even those who are mere apprentices and have not yet earned the right to live in the temple and its grounds.”

“It wasn’t a good dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream at all.”

“A—what do they call them?”

“Vision.” His momentary impatience was clear.

“Of what?”

“Water,” he told her.

“Water.”

“Yes. The waters are deep,” he added, speaking almost exactly in the tone and style of Evanton. “And things sleep within those depths that have not been seen by even the living Dragons, save perhaps two.”

She froze. “Something is waking.”

“In their dreams, yes.”

“What?”

“They’re Oracles, Kaylin,” he replied.

“So you don’t know.”

“No. They’re certain it’s not a good thing for the city. Which has a port. The Sages have been poring over the words and symbols,” he added, with just a flicker of his brow.

“And they get what anyone sane gets, which is confused.”

He actually offered a slight smile. “It is not yet clear to them, no.”

“Something big is going to happen.”

“Big enough to wake the Oracles—all of them—no matter where they lay sleeping.”

She was silent for a moment, candle forgotten. “And did they have any sense of timing?”

“Time is not as concrete for people who see into possible futures,” he told her quietly.

“That would be no.”

“That would indeed be no—but there is urgency. And I cannot think that it is coincidence that you came to me today to ask me about the element of water.” He paused. “The Keeper summoned you.”

“Well, no—” She stopped. “Maybe.”

“Then the child is someone connected to the water, I think.”

Kaylin nodded. “I have no idea where to start,” she added. “But … Ybelline also invited me to visit her … at her home in the Tha’alani quarter.”

Dragon brows rose. “And you accepted?”

“It wasn’t official,” Kaylin replied. “And … yes. Because I was in Missing Persons.” She trailed off. “Dragons don’t believe in coincidence, do they?”

“Not in this city,” Sanabalis replied. “They do, however, believe in lessons.” He stared at the candle.

“If the world were ending—”

“You’d still have work to do.”

The contempt in which candles were held by Kaylin could not safely be put into words in front of a Dragon lord—but it was still a close thing. Sanabalis, however, did not lecture her. He was quiet during their lesson, and his lower lids flickered often as he studied her face. At length he stood.

“Perhaps,” he said, as if grudging the word, “you require a slightly different approach, given your remarkable lack of success. Very well, Kaylin. The day after tomorrow, we will look at the shape of water. Be prepared,” he added softly. “There are many reasons why water is not the first element we approach. And why, in some cases, it is better not approached at all.”

He rose and left, and she sat in the West Room, staring at the plain surface of a nearly invulnerable table, seeing her future. Which would be in Nightshade, where so much of her past had unfolded.

It was well past midday when Kaylin made her way across the Ablayne, idly watching its banks for trouble. Almost hopefully watching the banks for trouble. It was a safe trouble—in as much as people trying to kill you or beat you to a messy pulp could be called safe

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