“You found them,” Kaylin replied. It wasn’t the Barrani thing to say, but the Barrani thing to say would probably take two hours of pointless, pretty verbiage.
He lifted a perfect brow, and a half smile formed on his lips. “As you say,” he replied. The smile vanished, as if it had never existed at all. “I am not certain we’ve found them. We have, however, found at least the female Leontine.”
“Marai,” Kaylin whispered.
“Yes. But be cautious, Kaylin. I do not know if she would respond to that name should you attempt to use it.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, in the sinking tone of voice that made the question rhetorical.
He didn’t reply. After a pause to let the non-reply sink in, he said, “We must leave, now, and in some haste. Andellen will have gathered some of my guards; and they will accompany us. Attempt to remember that I am Lord here. Andellen owes you a debt that you cannot conceive of, and he will tolerate anything you say or do. This will be understood by those who serve—who must serve—me. But I owe you no such debt.”
“And they’ll understand that just as well.”
“Indeed.”
Kaylin nodded grimly. If she could file reports with Mallory, she was certain she could do anything.
“Be wary, Kaylin,” he added in a softer voice. “Be aware that there are those you cannot save.”
The men who served Nightshade were armored. Even Andellen. It made a stark contrast between the men who followed and the one who commanded. It was also interesting to observe their reactions. They were, as expected, silent and deferential to their Lord. They were wary of Tiamaris—not that she blamed them, although she silently lauded their good sense—and they were…wary of Kaylin. Not in the same way. Men who see walking death—which, for the purpose of this observation, was the Dragon—tended to be wary in the I don’t want to die way. They weren’t that kind of wary around Kaylin. But she spent whole days not remembering the mark Nightshade had placed on her cheek, and this wasn’t going to be one of them.
Severn, on the other hand, seemed to be entirely beneath their notice. It’s not a mistake that Nightshade would have made.
In turn, the guards seemed entirely beneath Tiamaris’s notice, and they didn’t seem to be insulted by the lack of attention.
Nightshade walked past the guards. Kaylin followed, but his stride was longer and she had to work to match it. “Wait,” she said.
He turned. “Andellen.”
Andellen bowed briskly and broke ranks to join them.
“Kaylin Neya is, for the duration of our excursion, your responsibility. Answer any questions she poses, if they do not compromise our security. She is, of course, human, and is abrupt and somewhat graceless. You will overlook these flaws.”
“Lord,” Andellen replied, bowing again. The fall of his hair framed his face like a cowl made of dark light. “Lord Kaylin,” he said, and bowed to her.
She bit back the urge to refute the title. While it had become a running office joke, she understood that to these men, it meant far more than her squirming, annoyed embarrassment. To be embarrassed by it at all would be an insult.
“Lord Andellen,” she replied in kind, accenting his name in the High Barrani fashion. As much as she hated the language—and given the volumes of legalese that were all written in High Barrani there was a lot to hate—it forced a certain form and structure on her speech. Oh, she’d never be good at it, and it would never come as easily as Leontine—but High Barrani didn’t have a lot of unfortunate curse words.
“Lord Nightshade will be occupied for some time. His sense of the fief is not ours, and in this case, it is required. If you have questions you wish answered, I will attempt to answer them.”
“Are we going to stay in this fief?”
One dark brow rose. Clearly, whatever question he’d been expecting to field, it wasn’t this one.
His lips curved slightly. “You have a Hawk’s instincts.” He began to walk. She fell in beside him, and Severn joined them, walking to the other side of the Barrani Lord.
“Was she human?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
Kaylin frowned, and realized that the Barrani word she’d spoken was mortal, not human. They used it to refer to humans so often, it was an easy mistake to make. “Did she still look like a Leontine?”
His silence was telling; he clearly knew the answer and just as clearly was reluctant to give it.
“No,” he said at last. “I did not see her in the flesh. I saw what the mirrors saw, no more. But to my eyes, no.”
“How did he know it was her, then?”
“He is Nightshade,” Andellen replied gravely.
It took a moment for the weight of the sentence to sink roots. When it did, she was silent for at least two blocks.
“What does he want me to do?” she asked at last.
“Have you ever ventured across the borders of Nightshade?”
“Yes.” The single word was as flat and hard as a dungeon door, and just about as inviting.
“Not across the river,” he began.
“No. It wasn’t.”
“It is not considered safe—or wise—to cross the boundaries,” Andellen said softly. “And if you did indeed cross them, and you are here, you were either lucky or deaf.”
She said nothing.
“Kaylin.”
She looked across Andellen’s carefully composed expression, and met Severn’s gaze. She looked away. Took a breath. “We’re going to the edge of the fief.”
“Yes.”
“What do you expect to find there?”
“If we are both very unlucky and correct, a Dragon,” he replied. If Tiamaris, who kept an easy pace with Nightshade several yards ahead, heard the comment, he didn’t respond.
“And if we’re lucky?”
“We attract his attention when we are prepared for it.”
Which, to Kaylin’s mind, would be never.
“I’m supposed to catch his attention.”
“If necessary, yes.” There was a subtle hesitation before Andellen spoke again. “Lord Nightshade will not leave the fief.”
“But we’re going—”
“Yes. It is possible for him to leave, but at this time, it is not deemed safe. He is not a prisoner here,” Andellen added. “But if our enemy is stirring, if it is as we suspect, he cannot afford to be so far away from the core of his power.”
“So he’s just going to stand on the edge of the fief while we do—whatever it is we’re supposed to do?”
“Yes. You will be the bridge,” he said. “If it is possible.”
“Which fief are we headed toward?”
“It has no name that we speak,” Andellen replied. “And in truth, very little of Nightshade borders it. We do not travel there. I think very few who live do.”
Severn was tense. She could see it in the way he moved. His stride was graceful, but there was a deliberation about his movements that made the entire street seem like a battlefield.
Which, in an hour or two, it could well be; the sun was on the wrong side of noon, and setting fast. She shivered in the heat.
“You can hear them?” Severn asked.
She started to say no—and stopped. Because she could hear the rumbling howl of distant Ferals. And it was still daylight by anyone’s definition, even if morning felt like it had happened three weeks ago.
“How much do you know about the fiefs?” he asked her as they continued to walk. The streets cleared like parting water around a moving, dark rock.
What did she know about the fiefs, now? There were seven—or so it was believed. Of the seven fieflords, three were rumored to be Barrani; she was certain of only one, and couldn’t even be certain that the other two weren’t, in the Barrani sense of the word, dead. The Law was the fieflord’s will. Enforcing the Law was the privilege of power. Had the Emperor been different, though, would the rest of the city not be a richer, more populated version of the fief
s?
“We grew up there,” she said. “All we ever wanted to do was cross the river.” But she was not across the river now. She was walking the streets of Nightshade, as terrifying to the people who had never managed to escape as any of Nightshade’s men had been to her when she had been a child.
“I wanted to arrest them—the fieflords—when I was made a Hawk. It was the first thing I wanted to do.”
“And did you research ways you might do this?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I badgered Marcus about it for two or three weeks.”
Severn almost laughed. She could see the brightness of the sound in the widening of his mouth, but it didn’t escape.
“I stopped when he threatened to eat my liver, after removing it slowly first.”
He did chuckle at that, and she joined in.
“But he said no. He asked me to drop it, and in truth, Severn, I think I wanted to. I wanted it to be someone else’s problem. I wanted to live in Elantra, not Nightshade.”
“There are seven fiefs that we know of,” Severn said.
“That we know of. If that much of what we know can actually be classified as knowledge, not myth.”
“The Wolves have investigated the fiefs before. Sometimes people realize they’re being hunted. They don’t have the time to flee the city, and they’re smart enough not to trust the gates or the closer inns in any case. But they know the fiefs are outside of the Law.”
“So are the Wolves, when they hunt.”
“I won’t get into philosophical arguments about the nature of the warrants the Emperor issues. We hunt, they run. Some have been smart enough to cross the river. Those, we almost inevitably lose.” He hesitated. “The fiefs are not the same in size. One or two are quite small.”
“And you know who the fieflords are?”
“No. Not in the same way I know Nightshade. I think you have to live in one to understand it fully.” He paused again and said, “To our understanding, the fiefs may change lords—but they don’t change boundaries. It’s not like the Quarters in the city, where the merchant’s quarter has spilled out and taken over streets that were once residential—fief boundaries are fixed. They don’t move.”
She nodded slowly. “It…it agrees with something Nightshade said. About the fief, and its boundaries. But the fiefs border each other, don’t they?”
“Nearest the city, yes. The streets demark the boundaries the way they do in any other neighborhood. But Kaylin? We’re not heading toward the city, or the fiefs that border the city. It’s considered unsafe to cross the boundaries of a fief in any case. Some of that is superstition—it seems foolish and hysterical to those who live without hunting Ferals and other night creatures.”
“Where are we going, Severn?”
“In,” he replied. “Not far.”
“The Wolves went in?”
“Yes. They traveled through Nightshade.”
“The way we’re traveling now.”
“With fewer numbers, no armor, and much less obvious weaponry, but yes, they took this route. I knew this fief,” he said. “And they captured as much as I knew in a Tha’alani memory crystal.”
“You let them?”
“I volunteered. They chose to travel in Nightshade where possible. They crossed the border of Nightshade into Barren, to the west, and Liatt and Farlonne to the east and southeast.”
“Liatt and Farlonne border the city, at least in some places.”
He nodded. “Nightshade and Barren have the easiest access to the rest of the city, and the widest borders city-side.”
“The fiefs are almost circular.”
“Irregular, but yes. Opposite Nightshade, also bordering some part of the city, are Durant and Candallar. It is Farlonne and Candallar that are ruled, or so it is said, by Barrani.”
“So it’s said?”
“Ask in the High Court,” he replied. “But don’t be surprised if you receive no answer. Nightshade is Outcaste, but in some fashion, acknowledged. They would ride to war on him, if they could—but they accept his existence as the insult it is. The others…are less clear.”
“Are they even alive?”
“Our operatives were not given instructions to visit the fieflords,” he replied. “Merely to map out what they could of the fiefs. Much of what the Halls knows comes from those surveillance missions.”
“That’s six,” she told him.
“Yes. Six.”
“But there are seven fiefs.”
“The operatives who traveled in the six returned. The operatives who traveled to the seventh—and it’s not clear to me that something as simple as a seventh fief even exists—following the path and the map taken from my memories, came this way. We don’t know what they found,” he said. “They never escaped to make their reports.”
CHAPTER 21
The streets in this part of the fief were narrower than the streets that bordered the city proper. They were also unfamiliar to Kaylin. The houses that overhung the street—and that was the right word—looked as if they wouldn’t comfortably support a family of mice or a colony of cockroaches. Humans, on the other hand, could find a way to wedge themselves into anything; she could see glimpses of faces peering down through broken shutters. Only glimpses, though. No one was stupid enough to throw the shutters open for a better view.
Kaylin wouldn’t have been. It was obvious that Lord Nightshade was in the street below, and attracting Ferals seemed safer and smarter.
But the road itself, such as it was, wasn’t in good repair, and it was clear that wagons didn’t travel here. Horses probably wouldn’t like it much either, although Kaylin didn’t ride, and couldn’t be certain. She distrusted horses on principle. They were larger and faster than she was, and she seriously doubted that without their consent she’d have much control over what they did.
The Halls of Law did own horses, of course. The Swords were all required to ride them. Or at least to learn how. The Hawks weren’t, and it was a distinction she was grateful for. Among other things, she really didn’t like the way horses smelled. That, and the first time she’d been introduced to one, it had tried to step on her foot. There’d been a lot of snickering about that, but thankfully, none of it around Marcus. If he was too close to the horses, they were skittish and spent most of the time with at least two of their hooves off the ground.
“Lord Kaylin,” Andellen said. There was perhaps a touch less deference in the title than there had been. She had the grace to flush.
“Sorry. I was thinking about horses.”
“You ride?”
“Only in carriages that Teela isn’t driving.”
His lips creased in a slightly strained smile. “What do you see, Lord Kaylin?” he asked, and lifted his arm.
She frowned, as if it were a trick question. “Ratty streets with what used to be cobbled stone. Dead weeds. Buildings that should have fallen down half a century ago.”
He waited. When it was clear she’d said as much as she was going to, he turned to Severn. “Corporal?”
“I see what she sees, with perhaps less disdain.”
“What do you see, Andellen?”
“What you see,” he said softly. He lifted a hand in command, and the men, who were keeping pace, stilled instantly. They began to fan out across the width of the narrow street, for reasons that were unclear to Kaylin.
“Lord,” Andellen said quietly. The emphasis on the single word made clear to whom he spoke.
Nightshade turned. He had walked farther down the road than any of his men; only Tiamaris accompanied him. But when he stopped, the Dragon stopped as well, facing out and down the street, where Nightshade turned, at last, to the Barrani guards.
Kaylin took the opportunity to approach Tiamaris; when she was five feet from his back, he lifted a hand, the gesture almost exactly the one that Andellen had used. She stopped walking. “Tiamaris?” she said.
“Kaylin.”
“What do you see?”
His silence was almost tangible. It was his only answer.
“Kaylin,” Nightshade said. “Leave him. His task here is subtle and it requires concentration.”
She walked back to Nightshade. “What is his task?”
“He attempts to see beyond the boundaries of my fief,” Nightshade replied. “And what he sees—or does not see—will tell us much.”
“Will any of it be useful?”
“Perhaps. Information is useful in unpredictable ways. He seeks some sign of the Outcaste Dragon.”
“And of Marai?”
“He will not be able to sense Marai unless she is very, very close.”
“She isn’t here.”
“No. But she was, and she traveled this road. She did not travel it quickly, and she did not travel it unharmed.”
Kaylin opened her mouth. Closed it again.
“But the injuries she took were less, by far, than those she caused. If it eases you at all, she met Ferals.”
“It does,” Kaylin said. “Thank you.”
“What do you see, Kaylin?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? I see a street, and we’re standing in the middle of it.”
“A street.”
She nodded. “You?”
“I see the boundary of the fief of Nightshade,” he replied. “Lord Tiamaris is standing on its edge. Beyond it? There is a road. It continues. But it is flat and illusory to me. Where it goes, I cannot go.”
“You’ve left your fief before.”
“Indeed. But never in that direction. Beyond this border is the heart of the fiefs, Kaylin. The fiefs surround it, bordering both the Emperor’s city and each other—but they do not penetrate it. I ask what you see because in the fiefs, ancient words have power, and you are wearing more of them across your body than I have seen in any one place that is not my Castle.”
She hesitated.
“You see what you expect to see,” he continued. “See, instead, what is there. If you have any hope of finding your Leontine, it lies beyond Tiamaris.” He lifted a hand and brushed her cheek gently; she felt the mark on her face tingle and cool. “Go.”
She nodded, wordless.
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