“This is the longhouse,” Kaylin said.
Demett nodded.
“Demett,” she said, as he turned, “what is the longhouse used for?”
His face went that shade of expressionless that actually meant he was talking—but only to the Tha’alaan: to the minds of his people, and the memories of the dead. She waited for it to pass, as if it were a cloud; it took a while.
“Wait for Ybelline,” he told her quietly.
Ybelline came through the crowd slowly. You could see where she might be moving because her movement caused the other Tha’alani to move, like a human wave composed entirely of bodies. The building was packed. Kaylin thought there might be six or seven hundred people just beyond the open doors, more if the children so absent from the streets were also there.
But Ybelline did not come alone; the movement of the crowd, the slow outward push, wouldn’t have been necessary to allow just one person through. The people spilled out into the streets, beyond Kaylin and Severn. Rennick’s shoulders curled in, and he brought his hands up once or twice, as if to fend off any contact.
The Tha’alani in turn avoided him.
They would. They knew fear when they saw it, especially Rennick’s fear—and his fear was poison to them. They tried just as hard as he did to avoid any contact, but Kaylin had to admit they were more polite about it.
Ybelline appeared at last, between the shoulders of about sixteen tightly grouped men and women. She wore robes, an earth-brown with green edges; her hair was arranged both artlessly and perfectly above her slender neck. Her eyes were the honey-brown of that hair, but they were ringed with gray circles. She looked exhausted.
Exhaustion did not stop her from opening her arms, stepping forward and hugging Kaylin. And nothing in the world would have stopped Kaylin from returning that hug. Nothing.
“Tell me,” she whispered, her lips beside Ybelline’s ear. She knew she should have introduced Rennick, but it had been Severn’s idea to drag him here, and he was therefore, for the moment, Severn’s problem.
The slender stalks, which were the most obvious racial trait of all the Tha’alani, brushed strands of Kaylin’s hair from her forehead, and then settled gently against skin. They were so delicate, the touch so light, they could hardly be felt at all.
But Ybelline could be—and more, she could be clearly heard. Could clearly hear. With this much contact, she could, if she wanted to, peruse every memory Kaylin had, including ones she wasn’t aware of herself. All the hidden things could be revealed, every bad or stupid or humiliating thing Kaylin had ever done.
And Kaylin, knowing this, didn’t care.
But she wasn’t prepared for Ybelline’s voice when it came. It was raw and, at first, there were no words—just the sense of things that might have become words with enough distance and effort. With too much distance and effort.
But she saw what Ybelline meant her to see in the brief glimpse of steel and blood and the bodies of the fallen, all interposed, all flashing over and over again in quick succession in front of Kaylin’s eyes. Except that her eyes were closed.
Help me. Just that, two words.
Kaylin rolled up her sleeves and, without even looking at her wrist, pressed the gems on the bracer in the sequence that would open it: white, blue, white, blue, red, red, red. She dropped it on the ground as if it were garbage—but she could. If she’d tossed it on a garbage heap, it would find its way back to her. She’d only tried that once. Maybe twice.
This was magic’s cage. And without it, she was free to do whatever she could. For this reason it was technically against orders to remove it.
Her hands were tingling. “Ybelline,” she said, and then, Ybelline.
Ybelline, you have to let go of me.
The Tha’alani castelord did as Kaylin bid; she let go, withdrew her arms, her stalks. With them went the wild taste of fear—Ybelline’s fear. She kept it from the Tha’alaan, and therefore from her people, but she was exhausted. And Kaylin understood the exhaustion; it was hard for any Tha’alani to live alone, on the inside of their thoughts, the way humans did.
The way humans needed to.
The Tha’alani who had followed Ybelline out of the longhouse had come bearing stretchers. Four stretchers. Four men. They might once have worn armor—had, Kaylin thought, remembering the brief flash of images that had emerged from her contact with Ybelline.
But they weren’t dead. They weren’t dead yet.
“Put them down,” Kaylin said, easing her voice into the command that came naturally when she was on the beat. There were no children here; she had time to notice their absence, to be grateful for it. No more.
The crowd stepped back. The bodies lay on stretchers. Someone had dressed wounds, had cleaned burns—burns!—had done what they could to preserve life. Freed of the constraints that the ancient bracer placed on her magic, Kaylin knelt between two of these stretchers and touched two foreheads with her right and left palms. She was gentle, although she didn’t have to be—the men here were in no danger of regaining consciousness anytime soon. They had that gray-white pallor that spoke of loss of blood. She was surprised that they hadn’t succumbed to the wounds they had taken. Many of those wounds weren’t clean cuts; they had been caused by people who weren’t used to handling weapons.
Kaylin grimaced. “Severn?”
She saw his shadow. Knew he was listening.
“Get water,” she told him. “I’ll need it.”
“There are four men—”
“I can do this. Just—water. Food.”
His shadow was still for a moment, but he was silent. Everything they said or did now—every single thing—would be watched by all of the Tha’alani, no matter where they were, no matter how young or how old, how strong or how weak. All of the Tha’alani who watched would see, and what they saw would become part of the Tha’alaan, the living memory of the entire race; Tha’alani children four hundred years from now could search the Tha’alaan and see the events of this day through the eyes of these witnesses.
And for once in her life, Kaylin was determined to make a good impression.
Severn knew; he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that humans—her kind, and his—had done this damage. He knew how important it was to the city that humans be seen to undo it. She didn’t even hear him go.
It was hard.
It was harder than destroying walls that were solid stone, harder than killing a man. Healing always was. It was harder than saving infants who were trapped in a womb; harder, even, than holding their mothers when shock and loss of blood threatened their lives.
Harder than saving a child in the Foundling Hall.
But she had done all of that.
She felt the shape of their bodies and the beat—erratic and labored—of their hearts. She heard their thoughts, not as thoughts, but as memories, almost inseparable from her own. She felt their injuries, the broken bones, the old scars from—falling out of a tree? She even snorted. These weren’t men who got caught out in bar brawls.
They weren’t men who were accustomed to war of any kind.
She could save them. She could see where infection had taken its toll, eating into flesh and muscle. Two men. If she wanted them to live, she couldn’t use any more power than was absolutely necessary. No miracles, not yet. No obvious miracles.
But the subtle ones were the only ones that counted.
The bones that would knit on their own, she left; the ones that wouldn’t mend properly, she fixed. She tried not to see what had caused the breaks, but gave up quickly. That took too much effort, too much energy.
When she lifted her hands from their faces, she felt the touch of their stalks, clinging briefly to her skin. She told them to sleep.
She heard Ybelline’s voice. Felt Severn’s hands under her arms, shoring her up as she stood and wobbled. She didn’t brush him off, didn’t try. She let him carry some of her weight as she approached the last two men, their stretchers like pale bruises on the ground.
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She felt grass beneath her knees as she crushed it, folding too quickly to the ground. Righting herself, which really meant letting Severn pick her up, she reached out to touch them.
Shuddered.
They didn’t wear helmets. And the most obvious weapon they had—in the eyes of humans, of anyone outside—were their stalks. One man’s were broken. Just…broken. There were no bones in the stalks themselves—but even muscle and tendon could be crushed out of shape, smeared against a skull that was also fractured badly. Bones don’t hurt. The stalks—there were nerves there, so many nerves.
Gritting her teeth, she said, “Ybelline—I think this is going to hurt him. I think he’ll—”
Ybelline knelt in her shadow, knowing which of the two Kaylin meant. She reached out, caught the man’s bruised hands (two fingers broken), and held them fast. Leaning, she bent over his face, and her own stalks, whole, unbruised, reached out to stroke the sides of his face, his cheeks, his jaw. “Do it,” she said softly.
Kaylin nodded.
Here, too, she reached out with her power, with the power that had come the day the marks had appeared on her arms and legs. Words burned on the inside of her thighs, where no one could see them. They burned up and down the length of her arms, and flared on the back of her neck.
She didn’t care.
It’s very important that no one know of this, Marcus said, in memory. It’s important that you do not reveal your power to anyone. Do you understand, Kaylin?
Get stuffed, she told him.
He fell silent, memory closing its windows. What she had actually said? More polite, longer, a promise of secrecy.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, now, but this: healing those horribly damaged stalks.
The man woke when she’d knit bone and brain into something like its former shape; she had known he would. He screamed, once, when she started on his stalks. The scream cut out in the middle, and silence eradicated its echoes.
The last man shouldn’t have been alive. He had taken a single clean wound to one side of the heart, and he had bled so much. Kaylin felt magic in him, around him, when she touched his chest. She let it be, and concentrated, though it was much, much harder now.
But it didn’t matter, for he was the last. The three would live, and the fourth—damn it—he’d live too. She felt her lips cracking as she spoke. Her hands were shaking too much to keep steady; she didn’t even bother to try.
Just this one, she thought. Just this one, and I’ll be good. I’ll be good for months. I’ll be good for-bloody-ever. Just this.
“She’s awake,” someone said. A young someone. Either that or a very skinny midget with a very high voice. Kaylin winced and managed to lift an eyelid. She regretted it almost instantly. There was just too much damn light.
“She’s speaking!” the child said. He said it loudly.
Kaylin opened her eyes—both of them—and winced again, lifting her hands to her face. Getting up was almost out of the question.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” The child spoke slowly, his Elantran deliberate.
“I’m awake,” she answered. She could see his eyes—they were brown, and they were wide. His stalks were flapping in the nonexistent breeze.
“I’m supposed to tell Ybelline you’re awake. When you’re awake.”
“She must trust you a lot,” Kaylin managed.
The child—boy? Girl?—beamed. “I’m going to grow up to be castelord!”
“It’s a very hard job,” Kaylin replied, wanting him to take his smile and play somewhere else. Feeling bad about it, too. There wasn’t much you could feel that couldn’t be made worse by a solid dose of guilt.
“It’s an Important job.”
“That too. Are my friends still here?”
“Yes!”
“Good. Um, where am I?”
“In the home of Ybelline Rabon’alani,” Severn said, his voice drifting in from an archway that she could barely see. “It’s…more crowded than it was the last time we were here.”
“I’d noticed.” She tried to sit up. Gave up halfway through.
“I brought water, and food. Ybelline had you carried here when you collapsed.” He glanced at the child as he made his way to Kaylin. “I would have waited,” he said, “but Rennick wished to speak with Ybelline—and her advisors, as he calls them—and I thought it best to…translate. She asked Ellis to watch over you.”
“Ellis?”
Severn glanced pointedly at the back—well, top, really—of the child’s head. “He joined us when we were on the way here, and there wasn’t much that could be done to convince him it wasn’t safe. You’re known here,” he added, with a slight smile. “And Ybelline knew you were concerned about the absence of the children.”
Kaylin did not nod. It would have hurt too much. But she did manage a feeble smile. “Where did the—the others go?”
“The Tha’alani guards that were injured are in the longhouse. Two of them are awake, two of them are sleeping. None of them are now in danger. The Tha’alani doctors are quite surprised.”
She winced. “It’s not as if they’ll tell anyone.”
“It’s not the Tha’alani that I’m worried about.”
“Then who? Oh. Rennick.”
“Ellis, come and hold this waterskin for Kaylin. You can feed her anything she’ll eat,” he added. He bent down quickly and kissed her forehead. “Well done, Kaylin,” he said softly. “I don’t want to leave Rennick alone.”
She was stupid; she nodded.
“Oh, and Ellis? She’ll tell you she’s ready to get up and walk around long before she’s actually ready to get up and walk around.”
Ellis looked a bit doubtful, and the waterskin shook in his hands. It looked huge in contrast, like some headless, stuffed toy. “How will I know when it’s okay?”
“When she’s finished eating all the food and drinking all the water.”
Severn gave Kaylin the sweetest of smiles.
What she wanted to give him would not endear her to the future would-be castelord, and she tried very hard to remember this.
CHAPTER 3
Kaylin wanted to sleep for a day. Sadly, she wanted that day to be now, and would also have liked it to be longer by forty-eight hours than the average day. Ellis didn’t talk a lot; the effort of making Elantran words was obviously not trivial. But, mindful of Severn’s dictate, he encouraged her to eat and drink.
He must have either had younger siblings or spent time in the Tha’alaan watching other people’s children, because his form of coaching left something to be desired. The cooing, Kaylin admitted to herself, might be cute—and even hilariously funny—on another day.
Like, say, a day in which she didn’t feel like she’d been on the losing end of a bar brawl with the occupants of an entire tavern. But the food did help, as did the effort of keeping the ill humor out of the words she was speaking to a child. She did not, however, offer to let him touch her forehead with his stalks. If he wanted to be castelord, he was going to damn well have to learn how to talk the hard way.
And explaining the words that she was thinking to a young child of any race—never mind a young child with an entire Quarter’s worth of parents and grandparents in attendance courtesy of the racial gift of mindspeaking—was not on her list of things to do on any day.
When she had finished eating and drinking everything—and Ellis had shaken the waterskin up and down just to make certain—Ellis tried to help her to her feet. She was certain that her knees would recover from the way she had to fall in order not to crush him.
But even at her crankiest—and this was pretty much the nadir—she found something about his solemnity touching. She stumbled beside him as he led her to Ybelline because, even if she couldn’t read minds, it didn’t take mind-reading to know that he considered this babysitting of a Real Adult a task of honor and importance, and she didn’t want to take it away from him.
She was entirely unprepared for Ybelline, becaus
e Ybelline met her on one side of the arch that Ellis, talking to her as if she were a sick puppy, was urging her toward. Ybelline’s hair was down—literally—in a honey-gold cascade that obscured her shoulders. Her eyes were the same color, the same almost gold, almost brown. The light that came in—far too brightly—from the open windows and half-walls seemed to have stopped there for the sheer pleasure of illuminating the castelord of the Tha’alani.
The Tha’alani woman who wasn’t classically beautiful—if there was such a thing—was radiant anyway. She had changed into a simple, cream gown that fell from her shoulders to her ankles unimpeded. All of this, Kaylin took in at a glance—and even if she’d wanted to see more, she wouldn’t have been able to, because Ybelline Rabon’alani crossed the distance, ignoring Ellis’s loud warnings, and enfolded Kaylin Neya, scruffy and severely under-rested Hawk, in her arms.
It felt like home, to Kaylin. She let her forehead lean against the taller woman’s shoulder, and she wanted to stand that way forever. But that wasn’t why she’d come, and she knew that Severn and Rennick were waiting somewhere. She hoped that Rennick hadn’t offended anyone. Anyone else.
“He’s been remarkably quiet,” Ybelline replied, speaking with the ease of long practice.
“That’s probably bad.”
Ybelline was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was guarded. “Possibly bad for you.”
“For me? Why?”
“He was at the longhouse. I would have refused him entry into the Quarter, but I was…distracted.”
“You had every right to be. The others—”
“They’ll live. They’re well.” Her voice was soft, and soothing.
“Good. I wanted—”
“You had to be the one to help them. Kravel was beyond us,” Ybelline added. “Even had we been able to heal him in other ways, he would have been lost to the Tha’alaan. But they have seen, and they have understood. Not all of your kind are insane. Not all of them are so maddened by fear that they must, in turn, be feared.”
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