Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  “You didn’t detect this door.”

  “Not immediately.”

  They reached the Tower. “Our apologies to the Halls of Law,” Tara said softly. “I do not think the missing boy will be found.”

  The doors rolled open; Kaylin remained on the outside. “If people are disappearing, there has to be some reason. The people Tiamaris listed as missing are all human, but they span age and gender. I’ve seen many ways humans can be bought and sold, but their value is entirely dependent on age, gender, and appearance. None of those require something as complicated as the portal. None of them require any level of magic. But magic clearly was used.

  “The victims aren’t, as far as you know, in the city anymore. They had to be sent somewhere.”

  “They were sent to the outlands,” Tara replied.

  “Tara, where are the outlands? Are they even in the Empire?”

  “Not in the sense Elantra is, no. But if you mean to ask me why those victims came from the fief, I believe it to be because such a portal could be opened here.”

  “Could it be opened in Ravellon?”

  “Perhaps—but there is little chance, in my opinion, that the ones who opened the portal would survive the opening.”

  “So it had to be here. What purpose would random victims serve?”

  “There was once a theory,” Tara replied, “that mortals were malleable because they had no True Names and therefore no confinement. They are not fixed in shape.”

  “They are,” Kaylin replied sharply. “If you attempt to break their shape, you generally damage—or kill—them.” But as she spoke, she thought of the Leontines and their story of origin and fell silent.

  “The Ancients did not perceive life the way you do,” Tara finally said. “I have not heard the voices of the Ancients for so long, Kaylin. Nor do I hear them now, in this; it is too small, too precise, and too secretive. My Lord will speak with the Imperial Order, but I think it unlikely that the Imperial Order will offer enlightenment. It is possible that the Arkon may have information that is relevant.”

  “Yvander was being led to Nightshade,” Kaylin said. The words were sharp and heavy. “In Nightshade, no one’s likely to care.”

  Tara frowned. “If something is preying on his people, he will. If he does not have sympathy for the individuals who have gone missing,” she added, “he is nonetheless Lord in his domain, and he cannot afford to overlook such predations.”

  “He didn’t give a damn about the Ferals,” was the sharp reply. “And there were certainly brothels like Barren’s, where predators from the City were welcomed.”

  “He did not turn a blind eye to the latter,” was Tara’s cool reply. “He profited from it, in a fashion of his choosing.”

  Kaylin’s hands bunched into instant fists. She’d learned, on the other hand, to keep still when she was in the grip of a sudden, unexpected anger. She met Tara’s steady gaze and saw that the Avatar’s eyes were no longer obsidian.

  “I have angered you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Kaylin replied, exhaling and loosening her hands, “I hate what you’re saying.”

  “Is it inaccurate?”

  “No. If it were inaccurate, I wouldn’t be angry. You’re not wrong, and I hate that you’re not wrong.”

  “My Lord would be sympathetic,” Tara replied. Her wings folded into her back and disappeared as she straightened out her apron.

  “We’ll take word to the Halls,” Kaylin said after a long pause. “If I don’t come to visit in the next two months, it’s not because I’m angry.”

  Tara frowned. “You are leaving?”

  “Yes. I’m going to the West March.” The West March suddenly seemed like a terrible waste of time. People were being kidnapped in the fiefs, and Kaylin and Severn were two Hawks who could navigate its streets. She didn’t say this.

  On the other hand, standing on the front steps of the Tower, she didn’t need to; Tara heard it anyway.

  * * *

  “Kaylin.”

  Kaylin, shoulders hunched, was looking for something to kick. “I don’t want to go to the West March. I want to be here.”

  “The fiefs aren’t our jurisdiction.”

  Kaylin said nothing for two blocks.

  “And that’s not why you’re angry.”

  Severn knew her. Sometimes, she forgot how well. “No.”

  “Nightshade?”

  “Yes.” She wanted to spit. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “I’ll bet you any money—and I mean any—that there’s a portal to wherever across the border. Whoever was taking Yvander to ‘lunch’ was leading him there.”

  “I wouldn’t touch that bet.”

  No one still breathing would. “But it makes no sense. The kidnappings. I hate magic.”

  The small dragon hissed in her ear.

  “I’m sorry, but I do.”

  He nipped her earlobe. Had he been larger, she would have grabbed him and tossed him off her shoulders. As it was, she managed to ignore him. “I think this has something to do with the embezzling. The biggest difficulty we’ve had in solving this case has been the lack of distribution of the stolen funds. It’s not in banks. It’s not in drugs. It’s not in gems or other concessions. It’s not in the hands of merchants.”

  “You think it’s in the hands of fieflords.”

  She did. “Tara’s half-right. They couldn’t just grab people off the street. Dozens? The fieflords would have to notice that. But what if they just buy people? Pay off fieflords? It’s not much different from killing them in brothels we’d shut down in two seconds on this side of the river. They don’t have that option with Tiamaris. He’d eat them for lunch.

  “And if it’s Barrani, they’d know that. They’ve been at war with Dragons on and off for centuries. If Tiamaris claims this as his, he’s not selling any of it—not for something as mundane as stolen treasury funds.”

  “What, exactly, would the Exchequer or the Human Caste Court derive from that? Stealing funds to give to Barrani to buy chattel doesn’t seem like motivation to risk life and limb—literally. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No.” She slowed. “It doesn’t. But I think it doesn’t make sense because we don’t know where the people went. We’re missing part of the big picture. What we’re not missing is the fact that ‘Michael,’ whoever the hells he was, walked Yvander across the Nightshade border.” With a great deal of bitterness, she added, “There’s no way he doesn’t know. He fingered the Arcanum. He knew who to blame. How?”

  “You’re going to Nightshade.”

  “I am.”

  Chapter 6

  The sky was so gray, it was almost the color of silence. The rage bled away as Kaylin walked; it left a familiar despair in its wake.

  It had never occurred to Kaylin, growing up in the streets of Nightshade, that a fief could be almost safe. But in Tiamaris, Ferals were hunted, and the ranks of those who formed Tiamaris’s unofficial guard force were growing; people wanted to hunt Ferals here; the young wanted to be heroes. Only the dangerously insane had ever done so in Nightshade, and in Kaylin’s admittedly small experience, they were just as likely to kill as the Ferals and for reasons that were just as clear.

  In Tiamaris, people came to the fieflord—or Tara, at least—to report their missing parents.

  Tiamaris had owned the fief for almost two months, if that, and these were the changes he had made. Dragons were a force of nature, as all Immortals were, but this Dragon, she understood and, in her own way, admired.

  Nightshade had owned his fief for far longer than she had been alive. He could have made the fief an entirely different place, just as Tiamaris was attempting to do. He hadn’t. He had never particularly cared about the people who eked out a miserable existence in the streets surrounding his castle. They were mortal and no more important than any other insignificant and transitory possession.

  The Ablayne came into view. She had seen
it so often from the wrong side of its banks that it was almost a comfort. The bridge that crossed Tiamaris wasn’t empty, and the men—and women—who walked it weren’t attempting to be furtive. They walked it the way the citizens of Elantra walked to any job or to any market. They did blink a little when they saw Kaylin and Severn, but only because they wore the tabard of the Hawks.

  With the streets of the city firmly beneath her feet, she relaxed—but not enough. “Will you go back to the office?” she asked.

  “If you’d prefer,” he replied with only a small gap between question and answer to indicate hesitance.

  She nodded, and he accompanied her down the riverside street until they reached a more familiar bridge. This one contained no foot traffic, no obvious guards, no carpenters or linguists; it was a bridge in name only and served as it had always served: as a wall, a way of keeping people in their respective homes.

  “I’ll be fine,” she told Severn. “It’s not my death he wants.”

  “You don’t know what he wants.”

  It was true. She didn’t. “I don’t always know what I want.”

  “No.” His smile was slight. “Mostly, people don’t.”

  “Or they want the wrong things.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Things they can’t ever have. Safety. Security. Things to remain the same. Some things,” she added quickly. She turned to him at the foot of the bridge. “I want to stay where we are.”

  He didn’t misinterpret, although he could have. Instead, to her surprise, he hugged her. She stiffened and then relaxed, slowly, into the warmth of it. “Don’t live in the past,” he told her.

  “I’m not. It’s just—it’s part of me. I feel like I barely managed to step out of the shadows, all of them. Ferals, loss, myself. I was kept as an assassin. I’m now paid to protect people from what I once was—and I want that. You—” She swallowed.

  “What I did for the Wolves wasn’t what you did for Barren.”

  “Excepting the obvious, how was it different?”

  “It was legal.”

  “Technically, what I was doing was legal, as well. Barren was the Law.”

  “Kaylin—”

  “I know.” She pulled away, lifting a hand and forcing herself to smile. “We’re not doing it anymore. We’re Hawks now. I’m not Barren’s. You’re not—”

  He lifted a finger to her mouth and the words ended abruptly. “Go ask what you need to ask. I’ll go to Missing Persons and file a report with Mallory and Brigit.”

  * * *

  It was hard to imagine that she’d once lived in Nightshade. She knew she had, but the visceral truth of life in its streets as an orphan had eased its constant grip; when she looked at the worn roads and old buildings, she could see them as they were, as they might have been in a different context. She could meet the furtive gazes of strangers, walk down the streets, and evince no surprise or dismay at the way the children and their minders fell silent, shrinking toward the cover of familiar doors or alleys to allow her to pass.

  She’d been one of those children, although she’d played on the streets far less often. Some of the older minders—grandparents or great-aunts and -uncles—had been kind enough, but that kindness extended only as far as empty streets and a lack of Nightshade’s thugs. If necessary to preserve their own, they would have handed her over in a minute; it was a fact they all accepted.

  Your kin wouldn’t, for the most part, although that was no guarantee of safety.

  Now, Nightshade’s mark adorning her cheek, no one would touch her. Most of the people who sidled away had no idea what the mark meant, which was fair; Kaylin wasn’t clear on the concept, either. But Nightshade’s mortal thugs, and worse, his Barrani thugs, did. It gave her a freedom in the fief that she had never had and never thought to have anywhere on this side of the Ablayne.

  That freedom extended all the way to Castle Nightshade.

  The streets that surrounded the Castle itself were empty of all but the fortunate few who made small deliveries to the fieflord, and they didn’t stop to chat for a variety of reasons. They weren’t dressed as foreigners; they were dressed as fieflings. Any delivery made to Castle Nightshade implied wealth, and any wealth was a target. If you couldn’t be parted from your wealth while alive, death wasn’t much of an impediment.

  She approached the guards who waited beyond the portcullis through which the open courtyard was visible. The portcullis served as the entrance to the Castle, but not in the traditional way. It was a portal that moved you from the street side of the metal bars to the inside of the Castle’s grand foyer, with a lot of nausea and magical discomfort in between.

  Andellen was one of the two men who stood guard. He bowed. “Lord Kaylin.” The words immediately caused a similar bow in the other guard. Kaylin disliked the gesture, but understood that Andellen wasn’t offering it for the sake of her pride or her position. It was tradition, and given how little tradition existed in his life in the fiefs, she tried hard not to begrudge it.

  “Lord Andellen.”

  “Lord Nightshade is waiting.”

  She grimaced. “Of course he is.”

  * * *

  Passage through the portal was always disorienting, in part because Castle Nightshade’s architecture wasn’t fixed. Like the Tower of Tiamaris, it shifted in place, responding to the desire or command of its Lord. The foyer was the only part of the Castle that Kaylin was certain remained the same between visits: it was too loud, too ostentatious, and far too bright. Large didn’t matter.

  She kept this to herself as she rose unsteadily to her feet, wondering, as she often did, if Nightshade deliberately made the portal passage as nauseating as possible to give himself the edge in any negotiations or conversations.

  “I hardly think it required,” was his amused—but chilly—reply. He was, of course, standing beneath the chandeliers. But his eyes were a shade of blue at odds with the situation, and the color immediately put Kaylin on guard.

  “You are cautious,” he replied, “as is your wont.” He offered her an arm. If she maintained physical contact with Nightshade, the Castle didn’t throw up new doors or halls and didn’t distort the ones she’d seen before. She reached for the bend of his elbow and stopped as the small dragon reared up on its unimpressive legs, extending his head, his small jaws snapping at air. It was, sadly, the air directly between Kaylin and the Lord of the Castle.

  “What is this?” he asked softly, his brows folding in almost open surprise—for a Barrani.

  “My newest roommate,” she replied tersely. She pulled her hand back, and the small dragon settled—slowly—around the back of her neck, looping his tail around the front.

  “It lives with you?”

  She had not come to the Castle to talk about the small dragon. “Yes.”

  “I…see.” He withdrew the offered arm. “Are you aware of what it is?”

  “A small, winged lizard,” she replied. The small dragon hissed, but did so very quietly. She knew Nightshade would have some interest in the small creature, and at the moment, she didn’t care. A cold certainty had settled into the center of her chest, constricting breath.

  His expression chilled. “You are, in the parlance of mortal Elantra, in a mood.”

  “I’m angry, yes.”

  “Have I done something to merit your anger?” As he spoke, he walked; if she wished to continue the conversation, she had no choice but to follow. “Have you made preparations for our journey to the West March?”

  It wasn’t the question she’d expected. “I’ve been given a leave of absence from the Halls of Law, yes. I will be traveling with Teela.” The halls of the Castle looked almost familiar, and they led to the room in which Nightshade habitually received guests. Or at least guests who wore the tabard of the Hawk on the other side of the bridge.

  “That is not entirely what I meant.” He led her to the long couch in front of the flat, perfect table that graced the room’s center. There, silvered trays held very taste
fully arranged bread, nuts, and flowers.

  “You know that the High Court is traveling there.”

  “Indeed.”

  “How exactly are you going to survive?”

  “Is my survival of concern to you?” He smiled.

  She ignored the question and the smile; the latter was harder. “You’re Outcaste, and even if the Barrani don’t view Outcastes the way the Dragons do, they won’t be able to ignore your existence if you’re constantly in their presence.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Be that as it may, I have reasons to believe in this case they will hold enmity and decree in abeyance.”

  “Reasons you’d like to share?”

  “At this point, Private Neya, you would not understand them; I believe they will become clear with time. My status, however, given the debt owed you by the High Lord, should not materially affect your own.”

  She lifted a hand to her cheek, which deepened his smile and lightened the color of his eyes. “Yes.” The smile faded. “It is not, however, concern for my welfare that brought you to my Castle.”

  “No. You already know what I want to ask.”

  His eyes, when they met hers, were dark, his expression smooth and cool as winter stone. “Ask,” he said softly. When her silence extended for minutes beyond awkward, he smiled. It was thin. “I would not have all effort in this conversation be mine. You made a decision, Kaylin. You have come to my fief, my Castle, to ask a simple question. Ask. I will not lie.”

  She exhaled. “There’s been a series of disappearances in Tiamaris.”

  His expression didn’t shift. At all. “Continue.”

  “One of the people who disappeared in the fief wasn’t a native. He crossed the bridge on a dare.”

  At that, Nightshade frowned. “That is unfortunate.”

  “Is it more unfortunate than the other disappearances?”

  “Of course. That mortal was a citizen of the Empire over which a Dragon claims ownership.”