Cast in Courtlight

by Michelle Sagara

  "I count four."

  "They can't attack four abreast."

  "No. Not unless they're stupid." His tone mirrored her thoughts: not much hope of that. In the steady light, the creatures padded forward, eyes and teeth gleaming, voices beginning their slow growl.

  Four ferals. Four hunting ferals in the High Halls.

  Kaylin stood beside Severn, her daggers ready. She could throw one; she wasn't willing to throw two. But they weren't weighted for throwing, and even if she was damn lucky, a lethal hit wasn't guaranteed. The Barrani Lord stood like a statue; he did not draw sword or otherwise move. The ferals glided past him as if he weren't there. But he was. Had he been a simple illusion, they would have passed through him, and probably the hard, stupid way.

  Ferals hunted anything that moved or breathed. They hunted in packs, but they weren't picky about their prey. Occasionally, Barrani guards had been caught by the ferals, to the great relief of the human denizens of the fief of Nightshade.

  It meant less ferals, after all. And possibly—just possibly—a few less Barrani.

  The ferals were about three yards away before they began to howl. It was a trick, and seven years ago, Kaylin would have been transfixed by the sound; now it was simply a warning. Two legs or four, she'd been hunted before. Ferals didn't have crossbows. They didn't have longbows. They didn't have magic.

  They didn't, she thought, as she brought the right dagger up and the left back, have scales or jaws the size of horses. They couldn't fly.

  But they could leap.

  As one, the front two did. Kaylin didn't look to Severn, didn't look behind him; she didn't try to find a place to hide. She wanted to for just a second—for less than a second—but she wasn't that child anymore.

  She was a Hawk. A Ground Hawk.

  Her feet were burning and numb. It would have made running hard. It didn't make much difference to fighting, yet. She caught the snap of a jaw with the flick of a knife; were it not for momentum—the feral's—it would have been easier. She'd expected the weight, but the speed was startling, and reflex took rein, kicking thought out of the driver's seat.

  She brought her left arm up and in, thrusting the second dagger toward the feral's momentarily exposed throat. She felt fur, and heat, saw eyes that reflected light. The feral leaped back, bleeding.

  The one attacking Severn didn't have that chance. He rammed his arm into the open jaw and cut through half its neck. The growl died into a gurgle, and Severn was in motion, forward motion.

  Kaylin's first feral turned to snap at him as he moved past, and she brought both daggers down through the base of its spine, crossing them over in a neat, brutal movement. More blood. Less fur. A glint of exposed bone. She kicked the feral over, pulling the blades free in time—just—to fend off the third.

  The halls were narrow.

  The feral was loud. Louder than she remembered, and she remembered ferals. The smell of them. The fear they caused. The desperation of night in the fief. Elianne.

  Her old name.

  And not her name. Her arm jerked as she tried to pull it back; the feral had a mouthful of silk in its jaw, and it wasn't letting go. This would, Kaylin realized, be because she was bleeding. The fabric was shiny; the blood ran down its length before it was absorbed. Ferals in a blood rage were just that little bit more stupid.

  And given that the teeth weren't connected to the bleeding parts—yet—this was to her advantage.

  She couldn't use the one arm, but she did have two, and the feral had taken hold of the right sleeve. Had she time, she would have cut it loose. Instead, she let the feral decide how far forward she was going; she stopped resisting its pull. She pitched forward, and the dagger traveled ahead of her. It lodged in the feral's eye, and she put the whole of her weight behind its travel.

  Yanking the dagger free, she paused to look at the weapon. One of Severn's, longer than what she was used to by maybe an inch, and sharper than her tongue at its harshest.

  She looked up; Severn was finished.

  They were standing a yard from the Barrani lord, who surveyed them with eyes that were... gray. He did not touch his sword. He did not otherwise appear to notice them. But he stood in the hall.

  Severn stepped past him, tense, moving against the wall. When he did not draw weapon or otherwise move, Kaylin traced the same path, with the same watchful wariness.

  The Barrani Lord began to fade from sight.

  Kaylin looked at her dress. The rips—and the blood—remained where they were. There was a gash from her elbow to her wrist, but it was shallow. She'd gotten worse in training exercises.

  Severn frowned and looked at her. She shook her head. "I guess the testing begins in earnest," he told her quietly.

  "The Quartermaster is going to kill me."

  He laughed. It was a wild laugh. "He's going to have to stand in line."

  "Here's hoping." Kaylin cursed, ran back, and picked up her shoes. Her feet were slightly blue. She put the shoes on, teetered, and forced herself to stand normally.

  They began to move forward, down the hall.

  She was almost ready to ride on Severn's shoulders, gathering more fingernail dirt, when something in the distance caught her eye. It lay across the floor, not moving. Severn's frown seemed etched across his face, but he stiffened, and held out an arm, blocking her.

  She glanced at him. She still held his daggers. He still held his blade.

  "Barrani?" she asked him.

  He shook his head. "Not like the last one," he added. "No armor."

  "No movement, either."

  He nodded carefully, but that was the whole of his movement. He seemed to have internalized all action, all physical motion. His eyes were narrowed, and his hand—the hand that held the blade—was white as the bone beneath skin.

  She lifted her head slowly.

  "Severn," she said. Her voice was steady. But only barely. The light began to gather, as if it were, like Severn, contained unnaturally. It grew brighter; the halls grew brighter.

  Although they hadn't moved, the light deprived them of the need: They could see. They could both see.

  Kaylin swallowed and closed her eyes.

  It didn't help.

  How could it? Eyes closed in the dark of her room—any room—for far too long, she had seen what now lay upon that floor. It had defined her life for seven years.

  And it had defined Severn's life, as well.

  Murder did that.

  She opened her eyes again, and began to walk forward. When she hit Severn's arm, she reached up and pushed it to the side. It gave slowly, as if it were a stiff gate. He did not say a word.

  She couldn't run in the shoes; she didn't try. Had she, she would have probably run in the other direction. It's what she had done the first time she'd seen them dead.

  Steffi and Jade. The children she'd half adopted in the streets of Nightshade, a world and a life away.

  They were bodies. Blood was fresh, but it had half dried. She could see as a Hawk saw; they were dead. Arterial bleeding. They'd both taken neck wounds; short cuts, but deliberate. So much blood for such a small mark.

  She hadn't taken the time to examine them.

  She hadn't taken the time to do anything but flee. It was her shame, and it marked her. Maybe some very stupid part of her mind had thought that if she did good—whatever the Hells that meant—it would count. And to who, in the end? It wasn't as if she worshipped gods. She mostly liked gods, as they minded their own business; it was their followers who gave her the occasional problem.

  What she hadn't done then, she could do now.

  She knelt by Jade's side, Jade, the younger of the two.

  Steffi had been like day, Jade like Dawn. None of them had been like night, not in the fiefs. Their eyes were open and unseeing; wide, blue and brown. They were so young.

  She lost the Hawk's view as she stared. She thought the color of the light had shifted, darkening and changing until all she could see was red. And she'd thought
that was a turn of phrase.

  Her mouth was dry. Her throat was dry. Words piled up behind closed lips, clenched jaw, as if they were a battering ram. She wanted to kill Severn.

  And Severn was waiting.

  She rose. Her skirts brushed their wounded bodies like a green shroud. She turned to face him. She hadn't touched them. She would have had to put the daggers down to do it, and the first rule of the fiefs was never disarm yourself in the presence of an enemy.

  But this enemy, this Severn, was different.

  He didn't even try to speak. All color had seeped out of his face, like sand through the slender neck of an hourglass. His expression remained unchanged. It was stiff, contained, unnatural. He moved down the hall toward her, his blade slowly falling as his arms reached his sides.

  He didn't let go of it. She saw that.

  Before she could speak—and she should, she knew it—he had drawn closer. Close enough that she could end it easily; she could drive the blades home.

  But he wouldn't have stopped her. She saw this clearly. He had fought her in the Hawklord's tower. He had fought her in the Foundling Halls, and outside, in the streets that surrounded them.

  He was done with fighting. Everything about him said that.

  She did not want to meet his eyes.

  She did not want to look away.

  Caught between these choices, she lost both. He walked past her—inches past her shaking hands, her exposed knives—and knelt against the icy floor.

  And then he did what she hadn't done; he touched their faces. He closed their eyes. He bowed slowly, bending at the waist until his head was almost level to the floor… was, in fact, level with their faces.

  But he didn't speak.

  He simply knelt and waited.

  And it came to her as she watched, shaking, that this wasn't an act of penance; it was a reenactment. He was doing, at twenty-five, what he had done at eighteen. He hadn't run after her. He had stayed.

  Almost horrified, she shifted her stance, her skirts swaying. She watched him, torn between rage and pity. Time passed.

  At last he unbent, and then he lifted them both, one in each arm. They were limp now, and heavy. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. She almost called his name, but she bit her tongue instead, for he began to carry them down the hall.

  She followed, as if she were a ghost, unseen. And in some way, she was. Her life turned, here, on this moment—but so did Severn's. And it should, gods, it should. The girls had had no one in the world but Severn and Kaylin, and Severn had betrayed them utterly.

  She had thought to lead them, in this place. But as always, it was Severn who led. He staggered once or twice with the weight of the girls. Their girls. He paused once, his back against the wall, crushing leaves she was certain he wasn't even aware of. But he did not let go of them.

  Had it been night?

  Strange that she couldn't remember. She followed. She wanted to carry one of them. She wanted to offer. But her tongue was frozen. She would have sheathed the daggers, but Severn wore the sheaths, and it was suddenly important that she not touch him or disturb him.

  He walked. She followed.

  Stairs opened beneath his feet, and he struggled down them. It made no sense that he could do this; he should have carried them one at a time. He should have thought—

  She swallowed. She had never asked him how he felt. Because it hadn't mattered. And it shouldn't matter now; he'd murdered them. But her throat had that peculiar tightness that spoke of trapped water, and she could barely breathe for the tightness, because with breath would come tears.

  By your choice, you shall be known.

  This had been his choice. And she had judged him by it.

  It came to Kaylin as she followed Severn that she couldn't see what he saw. She had seen the rune, and touched it, and it had vanished; he had seen nothing. Now she saw the halls, the stairs, the odd root-bindings that made the roof. But his odd movements, the way he slid to the side here or there, implied that he saw something different.

  He teetered. He stopped again, leaning on walls. She could see his face over the slump of Steffi's shoulders, her hair tangled and matted with dried blood, and she had to bite her lip. His face—oh, his face. For a moment, she could read everything in its lines. She couldn't look away.

  But he did, and when she could see him again, he was stiff resolve. More walking. The halls stretched on from the stairs into a different sort of light than the light that lit the walls above. Here, it was almost moonlight. The time for ferals. Death in the fiefs.

  And Severn walked on.

  Ferals, she thought, would smell blood. Ferals would come; they already had.

  She had her daggers ready, and she listened and watched because Severn couldn't. Perhaps because fighting would be a relief, no ferals came to interrupt this funereal procession, this silence.

  Finally, Severn came to a stop. He staggered, and his knees buckled. He hit the dirt awkwardly. And it was dirt; no cold, icy stone. But the ground was hard, she thought. She didn't touch it. Instead, she watched over the girls while Severn turned away.

  When he turned back, he carried not a blade but a shovel. Where it had come from, she didn't know; that it was magic, she didn't doubt. But neither of these seemed to be strange to her. She watched, and bore witness, to his pain and his determination.

  He began to dig. Hours passed, or so it felt. She had no like shovel to help him. Just daggers, and daggers wouldn't help. They wouldn't expand the earthen bed. They wouldn't deepen it, or make it long enough that it could hold, in the end, the two things precious enough to work for.

  She hadn't buried her mother.

  Her eyes were watering. She could have pretended it was something other than tears; would have told anyone who watched that some of the flying dirt had lodged in her eye. Tears were weakness. But to herself? No lies, here.

  Just Severn and her girls.

  He lifted Steffi first, and brushed the hair from her forehead. And then he kissed her forehead, all the while whispering something she could not hear. Prayer was useful then; she never wanted to hear it.

  He laid Steffi down in the grave, and then turned to Jade, who had been so difficult in her own way. Hard to love, wary to trust, plain and often sullen. But he held her more tightly. He didn't kiss her forehead because she had never liked to be kissed or touched much.

  He laid her, gently, beside Steffi, arranging them with care so that they would never have to be alone. And then he knelt again, as if he had no further strength, and he stayed by the edge of the grave for a long time.

  Almost longer than Kaylin could bear.

  She tried to take the shovel in her hands, but her hands passed through it. She tried again, and again, she was reminded that she was simply an observer here. She couldn't help in any way.

  It's not for him, she told herself in something very like fury and yet very different. It's for them. But no one was listening.

  Severn finally rose. There was blood on his hands and on his shoulders, on his chest, on his face; their blood. He didn't seem to be aware of it. He lifted the shovel, and she saw that his hands were blistered. And that he clearly didn't notice, or didn't care.

  He began to shovel the dirt back over them, like a blanket. She looked at his hands, at the growing dirt that covered Steffi and Jade, at the pointed end of the shovel. At anything but his face.

  And when he finished, he sat again, the point of the shovel buried in the hard earth, his hand upon its handle. He said nothing. What could he say?

  But he rose at last, and turned back the way he'd come.

  She was there.

  His eyes rounded perceptibly.

  By your choice, she thought.

  He saw the daggers in her hands. He saw her expression. He simply waited. And from the ceiling that should have been sky, the tendril of one great root eased itself out of the mass and dropped to the ground, planting itself beside the bodies. Had it been nearer the grave, she would have chopp
ed at it in fury. Even though she could see the words written across it like a bright banner.

  Shapes shifted, runes becoming different runes, and then becoming letters, until they were in Elantran and Barrani, a jumbled mix of languages ill suited to each other.

  What is your will, now? the words said.

  She shook her head. "I don't know."

  You know. And now you have seen what you did not see, and more. What is your choice?

  She said nothing. Severn did not seem to notice the root, although he must have heard her answer the shifting lines that appeared across its width in a band.

  "I think," she said quietly, "that he's suffered enough." Words she could never have imagined she would say seven years ago.

  Severn frowned; it was the look that stole over his face when he was concentrating.

  "You buried them," she said to him.

  He nodded. Stiff and guarded now, his expression neutral.

  "Where?"

  He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

  Her turn to nod.

  "Why? They're still dead. I killed them."

  "I want to go there." She hadn't, until she spoke. Or hadn't realized it. But she did. And only Severn could take her.

  She lifted a hand and touched his face; the tips of her fingers traced the scar he'd taken in a feral fight when they had both been young. To her surprise, he flinched, and she let her hand drop away.

  But the root had thickened, and the writing was now glowing a faint luminescent blue. Severn's frown made it clear that he was, at last, aware of where they actually were; the past receded. But it would never let him go. She understood that now.

  She had a better chance of escaping.

  Yes, the root said. You do. You were the Chosen, and you failed.

  "I couldn't save them," she whispered.

  That was not your duty.

  She understood then, and she did drive a dagger into the words of the root. Light sparked as metal hit wood; it did not even scar the surface.

  "They were my duty!" she said savagely. "I promised—"

  Your duty, Chosen, was to preserve the balance and the power. You failed. And this one was standing in your shadow. He understood what you failed to understand.