“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”
“Why would you say this? You said you don’t care about my kin,” said Scoros.
“I don’t care if they hate me,” he replied mildly. “It would hardly be the first time someone has. But…I do care about the city. I don’t want it torn apart by riots. I don’t want to see your people burned out of their homes.
“I can do this. Private Neya and Corporal Handred seem to have some understanding of your people, and they’ve been assigned to work with me. I don’t ask you to trust me. But the Emperor does, and in the end, we all live at his whim.”
Or die by it. Kaylin bit her tongue, hard, to keep the words on the right side of her lips. She thought Rennick had finished, but he surprised her. There seemed to be no end to his words.
“I admit that when I was handed this task, I did not consider it carefully enough. I considered it…political propaganda. Something useful for the Emperor, and of no consequence to the rest of us. Because of that, I could take…shortcuts. I could tell the easy story, pull the cheap strings. I was wrong, and I apologize for my ignorance. And I thank the Hawks for bringing me to your Quarter, because I understand better what’s at stake.
“I also understand that you are forbidden to speak of what actually happened…but I imagine, now, that what Private Neya believes is true. You did what you could to save the city. It’s not something I would have dared,” he added, “given public fear and sentiment. I would have holed up in my rooms in the Palace. I did, in fact, do just that.
“But from those rooms, I can now enter the fight in a different way. I will think about the Tha’alaan, and the tidal wave, and the fact that you walked out to meet it.” He turned toward the door, and then looked at Kaylin and Severn, both still seated. “Private? Corporal?”
Kaylin rose with effort. She bowed stiffly to the Tha’alani, and nodded once to Ybelline. But she lingered in the room as Severn and Rennick left it, and found that the wait was rewarded.
The Tha’alani, as one, seemed to shrink, their shoulders losing the unnatural stiffness of anger, their jaws unclenching. Their antennae were weaving in a riot of motion, beneath strands of hair that had curled with the city’s damn humidity.
“We thank you, as well,” Ybelline told Kaylin.
Scoros rose. “For saving our kin,” he said, “we offer no thanks—they are your kin as well, Kaylin Neya. You are the only one of your kind to be welcome in the Tha’alaan—and it holds some small part of your memories.”
She paled. “I tried—”
“Yes. You tried. And much was withheld, and we are grateful for that absence as well. But what you could not withhold, all can see. And believe,” he added, with a slight smile, “that all did see. They know you are not of the Tha’alani, and that you cannot again touch the Tha’alaan—but those moments were enough. They know you, and they will not fear you.
“But…your companion is both infuriating and surprising, and I think…I think perhaps we will trust him. And it is for that, that we offer our thanks.”
Kaylin nodded slowly. “I don’t like him much,” she replied at length, “but he surprised me as well. And as he can’t be bothered to be polite when his life depends on it—trust me, I’ve seen him with Dragons—he probably wasn’t lying about his concern. Or his apology.”
“You must join them. We have the Swords at our gates, and I do not think we will risk our own again until things are calmer.”
“Swords are better. They know how to calm a crowd.” She didn’t say anything about the most drastic of crowd-calming methods. She knew, as they all did, that the human mob outside was vastly less likely to attack the Swords.
The carriage was waiting for them. The Swords had ensured that. They had also ensured that all of the wheels and fine gilding were still intact, although the Imperial Crest probably had a lot to do with the fact; not even the most drunken and wayward of idiots thought his life worth defacing an Imperial Crest. It wasn’t a mistake you could repeat.
“Please drive us to the Halls of Law,” Severn told the coachman.
“You’re not coming back to the Palace?”
“Not for the remainder of the day.” Day wasn’t quite the right word for the shade of pinkish purple the sky had gone. “We will report to you in the morning.”
“In the morning?” Rennick said.
“Yes.”
“When in the morning?” The playwright now looked uncomfortable.
“We report for duty, fully kitted out, at eight.”
“In the morning?”
Severn nodded, his expression deliberately bland.
“Well, you can report,” Rennick said. “But bring some cards, or whatever it is you do when you’re not doing anything else—I’m a bear at that time of the day.”
“A bear?” Kaylin asked, inserting herself into the conversation.
“A figure of speech. Mornings make me grouchy.”
“We didn’t arrive in the morning today,” she told him.
“Exactly. And your point is?”
“It probably speaks for itself.” She tried to imagine Rennick in a more foul temper, and gave up quickly. There were some things it was better not to know.
“I will be sleeping at that ungodly hour. I think you should see about arranging some sort of shift work.”
She imagined the face full of fur that was an angry Leontine. You did not mess up Marcus’s schedule without a pressing reason to do so—end of all life as we know it being one.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she murmured, staring out the carriage window as the city rolled past.
Severn shook her awake when they arrived. The front doors were manned by Aerians. Clint was still on duty, which was unusual, given the hour. She took a few minutes to find her feet, and tried not to imagine her bed.
They made their way to the front doors, and Kaylin stopped as Clint lowered his halberd. “Aren’t you off duty?” she asked.
“I pulled in a favor.”
“You pulled in a favor.”
“Yes.”
“So you could stay later, guarding a door that no one ever attacks, with a halberd that hasn’t seen real use in more than a decade.”
“Less than a year,” he replied. “But yes, I take your point. We were in the fiefs at the time.”
“Point returned. But why exactly did you pull in a favor to work a double shift when you’re on duty in the morning? Clint?” She didn’t like the expression on his face. At all. “I’ve had a long day,” she said, running her hands over eyes that felt like they were full of sand. “So I’m a bit slow.”
“Be quicker,” he told her, without smiling. “I thought you would come back a bit earlier. I knew you’d be back before tomorrow.”
“This—what’s happened, Clint?” She pulled a memory out of her exhaustion: a Sword offering her his sympathies. It seemed like he’d said it weeks ago.
“You won’t like it,” he said, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever that this was an understatement. “But it doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’m serious, Kaylin. You get away with a lot when you’re dealing with Marcus, because he’s seen how much you’ve changed in seven years. He saw you at thirteen. He watched you struggle to become the Hawk that you are now. Part of him still thinks of you as if you’re thirteen years old, and that’s not likely to change.”
“And so?”
“Kaylin, please understand that this is important. All jokes about your punctuality aside, Marcus accepts you as you are. Not all of the older Hawks feel the same way, and not
all of them have been won over.”
She stared at him dumbly and was surprised when he handed his polearm to the other guard, and caught her shoulders in both hands. His wings were high; he was worried. “I’m very fond of you,” he said, his gaze an unblinking shade of gray that was unlike any color she’d seen. “But I took my oaths, and I’m sworn to uphold them. I also need to eat, and feed my family.”
“Clint—what are you talking about? Why are you saying this?”
“Because the people you will now be dealing with will not be Old Ironjaw. And if you don’t deal carefully, you won’t be a Private. It’s as simple as that.”
“W-what happened?”
“There was an incident,” he continued carefully. “Involving the Leontine Quarter.”
“What happened, Clint?”
“We’re not entirely certain. Teela and Tain are trying to ferret out information, but any information we get is going to come to us when we’re off the payroll. Understand?”
She nodded, although she didn’t.
“Marcus has been stood down. He’s been relieved of duty.”
“On what grounds?”
“Kaylin—we don’t know what happened. But the case has been referred to the Caste Courts, not ours.”
“What case?”
“Someone died.”
“Pardon?”
“A Leontine from a prominent clan died. He was killed by another Leontine. That much, we do know.”
“How?”
“The death didn’t occur in the Leontine Quarter. However, none of the witnesses were harmed, and remanding all investigations involving that death to the Caste Courts is well within the dictates of the Law.”
“But—”
“Marcus was present at the scene of the crime.”
“What do you mean, present?”
Clint closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clear, and his face had hardened into lines that Kaylin hated to see there. “He is currently in the custody of the Caste Court, awaiting a trial on murder charges.”
For once, Kaylin had no words to offer. A million questions, yes, but they were jammed up in the tightness of her throat.
“Corporal Handred?”
“Here.”
“You’ve been instructed to report for duty to the acting Sergeant.”
“The acting Sergeant? Clint!”
The Aerian to his left was an older man that Kaylin recognized. There wasn’t an Aerian on the force that she didn’t know by name, because there wasn’t an Aerian on the force who hadn’t been begged, pleaded with and cajoled by a much younger Kaylin. They could fly—they could carry her with them.
“Breen?”
Breen had clearly decided to let Clint absorb all the heat of this particular conversation, but his dusky skin, pale brown to Clint’s deep, warm darkness, looked a little on the green side.
“To whom am I to report?” Severn asked.
The hesitation was almost too much to bear. But when Clint finally spoke, it was worse.
“Sergeant Mallory.”
CHAPTER 4
Severn did not take Kaylin with him when he went to report for duty to the new acting Sergeant. He did not, in fact, report for duty immediately; instead, he grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her from the steps atop which the two Aerians stood. It took her about two minutes to realize that the dragging had a purpose: he was taking her home.
And she was exhausted enough to let him.
“I know what you’re thinking, Kaylin. Don’t.”
“What am I thinking?”
“That you should have been there.”
She winced. But she’d always been obvious to Severn.
“What you were doing affects an entire race. What we’ll be doing when we’re not dealing with the ugly fears of a mob will affect a much, much smaller group of people.”
“The Hawks.”
He nodded quietly.
“Why did he ask for you?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say Mallory’s name out loud.
“I don’t know. I’ve met the man once.”
“You ran interference for me when we went to Missing Persons.”
Severn nodded. “But given his feelings about you—and he was quite clear on those—I imagine that he won’t find my role as a Hawk much more to his liking.”
“He probably doesn’t know where you’re from.”
“Then he hasn’t done his homework.”
“Doesn’t seem likely.”
“No, it doesn’t. I imagine that Mallory knows quite a bit about the Hawks at this point.” He stopped. She stared at the street, and he pushed her gently up the few steps to her own apartment door. She’d gotten a new key, and it worked, but it took her three tries to get the damn thing into the lock.
“You’re tired,” he told her, when she cursed in Leontine. “Tired and Mallory are not going to be a pretty combination. Sleep it off. But understand that when you walk into the office in the morning, the rules will be different and everything will change. You wanted to be a Hawk,” he added. “Be one. Tomorrow.”
“I want to talk to the Hawklord.”
“Do that tomorrow as well.” He paused, and then added, “We couldn’t have talked to the Hawklord without speaking to Mallory first. I imagine he’s guarding the tower. Kaylin, he’s made it clear from the start, if I understand things correctly, that you should never have been a Hawk. Nothing would give him more pleasure than correcting an obvious error in judgment. But if he is a vindictive man—and I don’t discount it—he also appears to play by the rules.
“Don’t give him the satisfaction. Do nothing that he can use as an excuse. He’ll have his own worries,” Severn said.
“What worries?”
“His disdain for Marcus was widely known, and Marcus was popular.”
“Is.”
“Is what?”
“Is popular.” She began to stumble up the narrow stairs to her rooms. “Don’t talk about him as if he’s dead.”
“Is popular,” he said, gentling his voice as he followed her. “Most of the department knows how Mallory regards the Hawks under Marcus, and if Mallory is to succeed, he can’t afford to further alienate them. But if you give him an excuse, he’ll use it.”
She opened the door to a darkening room, the shutters wired into a safe—and closed—position. She might not have cared much for Rennick, but she shared his view about morning. And still got her butt out of bed on most days.
“I’ll be good,” she told him in the darkness.
“Tomorrow.”
She nodded again and walked across the room, stepping around the piles of debris that littered it. She removed the stick that held her stubborn hair in place, and sank, fully clothed, into bed.
“Sleep,” he told her. Just that.
She wanted more. She wanted him to tell her that the bad dream would vanish in the sunlight, that she would wake up and the city would be sane, and Marcus would be chewing his lower lip and creating new gouges on his desktop while he moved offending paperwork out of the way.
But she’d grown up in the fiefs, after all, and she knew that what she wanted and what she got had nothing, in the end, in common. She didn’t cry.
But she came close when he kissed her forehead and brushed the lids of her closed eyes with his fingertips.
She woke up to a loud, insistent knocking at her door. Daylight had wedged its unwelcome way through the shutters. She had to remember to get them fixed. Say, by putting a block of stone in their place.
She checked her mirror before she made her way to the door, still wearing the rumpled clothing from the day before. She paused. Someone had messaged her. Someone had tried to get her attention, but they hadn’t tried for very long. She didn’t want to check, besides which, the pounding at the door wasn’t stopping anytime soon. She bypassed the mirror, because if the first thing she saw this morning was the afterimage of Mallory’s unwelcome face, she’d break the damn thing, and th
e mirror was the most expensive thing she owned. She wouldn’t have bothered with the expense—gods knew she never had money—but her duties at the midwives guild pretty much made it a necessity.
Severn was standing in the door frame when she opened the door. He handed her a basket. “Breakfast,” he told her. “Eat.”
“What time is it?”
“Not so late that you don’t have time to eat.” It wasn’t precisely an answer. She lifted the basket top, and the smell of fresh bread became the only thing in the room. That and her growling stomach. “Hey,” she said, as she sat on the bedside and motioned Severn toward the chair. “Is this enchanted?”
“The bread?”
Her frown would have killed lesser men. “Very funny. The basket.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “I didn’t smell the bread at all until I opened it.”
“It keeps the rodents at bay. More or less.”
“Where’d you get it done?”
“Evanton’s.”
“He’d like it. It’s practical.”
“I think he thought it perhaps too practical. But he took the money.” He paused and then added, “It keeps the food fresher, as well. It won’t last forever,” he said, “but it lasts longer. Which, given the insane hours you generally keep, also seemed practical.”
“Wait—it’s for me?”
“It’s for you.”
She hesitated, and then nodded. “Thanks. Did you talk to Mallory?”
“Last night.”
“The Hawklord?”
“No. I’ll say this for Mallory, that paperwork is going to get done before the week’s out.”
“Ha. I’ve seen that pile—most of it was there when I got inducted.”
“Betting?”
“Sure. We can pool in the office.”
“Actually, we can’t.”
Silence. It didn’t last longer than it took to finish swallowing something that could have been chewed longer, judging by the way it lodged in the back of her throat. “We can’t bet?” To a fiefling, it was like being told don’t breathe.
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