Cast in Shadow

by Michelle Sagara

  She could almost imagine that he’d really changed. Had emerged from the fiefs, become something different. She hated the thought. And why? Hadn’t she? Wasn’t that exactly what she’d done?

  Glancing up, she saw the flag of the Hawks on its tower height, and she stopped a moment, hoping to hear its heavy canvas flap in the wind. But she was earthbound. Funny, how it was the unreachable things that had always provided her anchor.

  No, she thought, almost free of the shadows cast by the Towers. She hadn’t changed anything but her name. And now she was going back home.

  Because she served the Hawklord, and the Hawklord commanded it.

  The richest of the merchants liked to nest in the shadows of the Halls; they lined the streets, their expensive windows adorned by equally expensive dress guards and clientele. There were jewelers here—and what good, she thought bitterly, did they do? You couldn’t eat the damn things they produced, and they didn’t stop you from freezing to death in the winter—and clothiers, a fancy word for tailor. There were swordsmiths, fletchers, herbalists and the occasional maker of books. When she’d first heard of those, she’d snuck in with a pocketful of change to see what betting odds were being offered, and on who. Oh, that had kept the company in laughs for a week.

  What was absent were brothels, which lined the richer parts of the fiefs. Here, in the lee of the Halls, there were no girls on window duty, beckoning the drunk and the young, idle rich; she’d found the lack hard to get used to.

  She had known some of the girls who worked in the brothels, but not well; they were keen-eyed and sharp, and they often recruited the unwary. Not that Kaylin had ever been lovely enough to be in danger of that particular fate.

  But she didn’t pity them. Not those girls. There were others, on darker streets, where windows were forbidden because they hinted at freedom. She’d seen them as well. Seen what was left.

  Not all of the buildings that stood around the triangular formation of the Halls of Law were stores; the guilds made their homes here as well. And not all of the guilds were adverse to the presence of the Hawks. Kaylin frequented the weavers’ guild, and the midwives’ guild, almost as a matter of course. But she stayed away from the merchant guild, because it reeked of money and power, and she recognized that from a mile away. She thought that many of the men who had purchased membership in the merchant’s guild also purchased other services in the fiefs, but it was something that wasn’t talked about. Much.

  And when she’d first arrived? Well, she hadn’t talked much either.

  “Kaylin?” Tiamaris touched her arm and she jumped, turning on him. His brow rose, breaking the sudden panic.

  “Don’t touch me,” she snapped.

  “You really haven’t changed much, have you?” Severn said, eyes lidded. She couldn’t read his expression, but the scorn in his voice was unmistakable.

  Takes one to know one was not a retort she could be proud of, so she didn’t make it. Near thing, damn him.

  “What is it?” She kept the irritation out of her voice by dint of will.

  “You’ve slowed.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  “They forbid that, in the Wolves.”

  In spite of herself, she smiled. Severn had always made her smile. Always, until he hadn’t. He saw the change in her expression, and he fell silent.

  They walked.

  The streets opened up; horses were the mainstay of the merchants and the farmers who traveled up Nestor street. Nestor followed the river that split the city, crossing the widest of its many bridges. It was home to many lesser guilds, to lesser merchants and to the one or two charitable buildings that she thought worth the effort. The foundling halls, for one. She frequented those as well, but was more careful about it. Today she didn’t even acknowledge it with a glance. Because Severn was with her.

  Foot traffic stayed to either side of the road, and merchants were not above taking advantage of this. Her stomach growled as she passed an open baker’s stall.

  Severn laughed. “Not much at all,” he said, shaking his head.

  They were eating as they crossed the bridge over the Ablayne River; Kaylin stopped to look at the waters that ran beneath it. She wanted to turn back. Hawklord, she thought, as if he were a god who might actually listen, I’ll go. I’ll go back to the fiefs. Just give me any other partner. Even Marcus.

  Severn stopped beside her, and that was answer enough. She drew away, dropping crumbs into the water. Something would eat them; she didn’t much care what.

  The streets on the wrong side of the river would still be wide enough for wagons for blocks yet, but the traffic was thinner. In the day, the outer edges of the fiefs seemed like any other part of the city. If you stayed there, you’d probably be safe; patrols passed by, a stone’s throw from safety.

  “Did that crystal of yours tell us where the hell we’re going?” Severn asked her.

  “Which hell?” Actually, all things considered, it was an almost appropriate question. “Yeah,” she said. “Brecht’s old place.”

  “Brecht? He’s still alive?”

  “Apparently.” She shrugged. “Might even be sober.”

  Severn snorted. And shrugged. His hands, however, stayed inches away from his long knife. One of these days—say, when one of the hells froze over—she’d ask if she could take a look at it. From the brief glimpse she’d had, it was good work. “So much for dangerous. Why Brecht?”

  “He found the second body.”

  Severn winced. “He’s not sober,” he said.

  An hour had passed.

  They’d wandered from the outer edges of the fief into the heart of Nightshade, which had the distinction of being the closest of the fiefs to the high city’s clean, lawful streets. Because of its tentative geography, it also had the distinction of having more of an obvious armed force than the fiefs tended to put on display.

  Kaylin and Severn knew how to avoid those patrols. Even after seven years, it came as second nature.

  Tiamaris was grim and quiet, and he followed where they led—usually into the shadowed lee of an alley, or the overhang of a rickety stall—when one of these patrols walked by.

  And patrol? It was entirely the wrong word. It reeked of discipline and order, and in Nightshade, they were almost swear words. They certainly weren’t accurate.

  “Why exactly are we hiding?” Tiamaris asked, the seventh time they rounded a sudden corner and retreated quickly.

  They looked at each other almost guiltily, and then looked at Tiamaris. Severn’s laconic shrug was both of their answers.

  “You’re a Dragon?” Kaylin said, hazarding a guess that was a pretty piss-poor excuse. She knew that maybe one in a hundred of the petty fief thugs would recognize a Dragon for what he was, and he’d probably do it a few seconds before he died. Or after; in the fiefs some people were so stupid they didn’t know when they were dead.

  Tiamaris raised a dark brow; his eyes were golden. He didn’t feel threatened here. And because he didn’t, he probably wouldn’t be. That was they way it worked.

  “Fine,” she said. She unbent from her silent crouch and looked askance at Severn. His lazy smile spread across his face, whitening the scar just above his chin. It was the last scar she’d seen him take, and it had been bleeding, then.

  “I should probably tell you both,” she added, keeping apology out of her voice with effort, “that the Hawklord has strictly forbidden all unnecessary death in the fiefs while we’re investigating.”

  “Define unnecessary.” Severn’s face was a mask. Wolf’s mask. She could well believe he’d found a home in the Shadow Wolves. The Shadows—Hawk, Wolf and Sword—usually said goodbye to their members in a time-honored way: they buried the bodies someplace where no one would find them. She couldn’t understand why he’d left them. Or why they’d let him go.

  Didn’t, if she were truthful, want to.

  She shrugged. “Ask the Hawklord. It was his command.”

  “Interesting,” Tiam
aris said quietly.

  “Interesting how?”

  “Rule of law in the fiefs is defined by the fiefs. Even the Lords of Law accede that this is the truth.”

  She shrugged.

  His frown tightened. “Are you always impulsive?”

  She shrugged again. “I’m always late, if that helps.” And then, because his condescending tone annoyed her, she added, “You think he doesn’t want to annoy the fieflord.”

  “I think he feels it imperative that we don’t.”

  “And that implies that we’re here with the fieflord’s permission.”

  “Not, legally, a permission that is his to grant, but yes, that is what I think.”

  She turned the words over, thinking them through. After a moment, she glanced at Severn. He nodded. “I’m thinking,” she said slowly, “that I really don’t like this.”

  Severn smiled. “I’m thinking that it’s time for a bet.”

  “You haven’t changed either,” she said. The smile that crept over her face was a treacherous smile. She couldn’t—quite—douse it. Think, she told herself grimly. But thought led to the past, and the past—it led to darker places than she could afford to go today.

  She pulled back. “What bet?”

  “Well,” he said, nodding to the east, “there are four armed men coming this way.”

  She nodded.

  “And we’re not ducking.”

  Nodded again.

  “They’ll probably take it as a challenge.”

  Three times, lucky. “And so?”

  “So we’ll probably have to fight.”

  Tiamaris said, in his crisp, bored Barrani, “I think that unlikely.”

  “Don’t interfere, and we will.”

  “And what will that prove?” Kaylin asked, ignoring Tia-maris.

  “Nothing.”

  “And the bet?”

  “We fight.”

  “Some bet.”

  “And whoever pulls a real weapon first—you or me—loses.”

  “What’s the debt?”

  “I win, you let me explain.”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t lose, Kaylin. Here they come.” His smile was a thin stretch of lip over teeth. It made her feel every one of the five years that had always separated them.

  “Fine.”

  Tiamaris rolled his eyes. “You are children,” he said, just shy of open contempt. The words were Barrani—she wondered if the Dragon condescended to speak any other language when dealing with mere mortals—but the tone wasn’t. Quite. He folded arms across his broad chest and leaned back against the faded wood and brick of an old building.

  The men closed in. They were armed; they carried naked blades. One sword, she thought, a short one, and three knives that were as long as Severn’s weapon.

  “Hey, hey,” one said. He was a tall man, and his face was knife-thin, his eyes dark. “You’re visitors, I see. You’ve probably forgotten to pay the toll.”

  Severn said nothing.

  “You pay us, we’ll let you pass.”

  Kaylin added more nothing.

  The man smiled. “You don’t pay, and we’ll double the tolls, and extract them from your purses. Oh, wait, you don’t seem to have them.” He shrugged. Without turning, he said something in mangled Barrani. Kaylin understood it and tensed.

  But her hand didn’t fall to her daggers, her throwing knives or her small club. Instead, she widened her stance and waited, watching them carefully. They wore some armor; it was piecework, and it wasn’t very good. But they weren’t slugs; they moved.

  Two to one odds gave them some confidence; it was clear that Tiamaris had no intention of interfering, and he became just another part of the landscape. In the fiefs, this was not uncommon. In fact, given it was the fiefs, there were probably people up windowside, in the relative safety of their tiny homes, crouching and making bets with their roommates. Betting was the pastime of choice in the fiefs, especially when it involved someone else’s messy death.

  “How well did they train you, in the Wolves?” Kaylin asked.

  “Watch and see.”

  “Like hell.”

  He laughed.

  She might have added something, but there was no more time for words.

  She should have let Severn take the leader, because they were both the same height, and the advantage of height was not her friend. There was an advantage in lack of height, but it usually involved doing one’s best to look harmless and pathetic, and she’d given up that route when she’d left the fiefs to find the Hawklord.

  Being a woman? Meant nothing, to the fieflord’s thugs. Hell, she’d seen women in their ranks who were far more vicious than the men when they wanted to be.

  The city ladies made femininity a triumph of style, and honed their tongues instead of their daggers. Kaylin knew that seven years in the city had failed to make a mark when she swung in before Severn could.

  The leader wasn’t stupid, but he was overconfident; she wasn’t armed, and she wasn’t dressed like a flashy guard. He swung the dagger wide, choosing its edge as a threat, and not its point.

  Damage, not death; not yet.

  His loss. She let him swing, raising the bracer that caged her; the knife’s edge sheared through linen threads, and bounced up at an angle, leaving his ribs exposed. She was inches from his side before he could bring the long knife down, and she raised her leg to deflect his awkward kick.

  She swung in, one-two, breath coming out like short, sharp punctuation as she applied the whole of her considerable training to a single point. She felt bone snap; heard him grunt. He was good; she gave him that. He did no more than grunt.

  But he didn’t have much opportunity; her fist rose, opening at the last minute into flat palm as it clipped the underside of his chin, snapping his head up. She hit him in the Adam’s apple, and he stumbled backward.

  Severn’s snap-kick sent him into the two men who were coming up behind him. He didn’t hit them dead on; they’d already started to separate. But he did hit their right and left arms, putting them off balance.

  Rules in the fiefs were pretty simple. Honorable fights were for stories, idiots or dead people.

  Kaylin was already on the move, going for the man with the long knife on the left; Severn had the man with the short sword in his sights. She had the impression of height, width, dark hair; she could see a flash of red as the man with the sword swore, again in mangled Barrani. No doubt at all who these men served.

  The man she now faced, off balance, was heavier than his leader. He wasn’t any better armored, and he was cautious—but overbalanced and cautious were a poor combination. She let gravity take its toll on her opponent. He was fighting it, but that meant he was fighting on two fronts. She launched into a roundhouse kick, grounded her foot, spun on it, and finished with a back kick. Nothing broke this time, but the man staggered, dropping his weapon as he clutched his stomach.

  The fourth man came in on her right.

  He’d had enough time to survey the fight, and just enough time to pick his target; she obviously appeared to be the weaker of the two. It annoyed her. Marcus would have had her hide—although he considered humans to have so little hide it was almost not worth taking—had she let the annoyance get the better of her.

  She did the next best thing; she kicked his knee. Hard. She caught him on the side of the leg, and he grunted; he swung his long knife in, and she twisted her arm up in an instinctive, almost impossible position, to deflect it. Thankful for cages, for just a minute. There wasn’t a weapon in the city that could go through that bracer. The blow drove her arm into her chest, and she threw her weight onto her back leg, snapping a kick with her front one.

  He grabbed for her leg. He was too slow; it brought his chest in close enough that she could hit him. She did, throwing her fists forward and butting the underside of his chin with her head.

  She heard his jaw snap shut.

  And then he went flying as Severn caught the side of his h
ead with an extended side swing. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  And he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Then again, neither was she. She straightened up. “Two and a half,” she said calmly.

  “Two.”

  “Yours was an assist. I had him.”

  Tiamaris, however, had had something different: enough. “If you insist,” he said in cold and perfect Barrani, something to be feared in the fiefs, “you can play these games until sunset. But if you’ve finished proving some vague human dominance theory, we have work to do.”

  Killjoy. She caught his expression, however, and slammed her teeth down over the word.

  “Training in the Hawks isn’t bad,” Severn said, as he fell in step beside her, shortening his stride.

  “Wolves obviously know what they’re doing,” she replied, grudging the words. “We’re even here.”

  He nodded. “Why are you in such a hurry?” He asked Tiamaris’s back. “Brecht won’t be sober.”

  He wasn’t. And he wasn’t clean either. Not that it made that much difference; Brecht ran a bar, and the smells that lingered in the daytime were already overpowering enough.

  “Is he even alive?” Severn asked, from the vantage of the open door. There were no lights, and the windows were all shuttered. Brecht had always been damn proud of the fact that he had windows. Well, one of them, anyway. The ones near the door were pretty much boards, these days.

  “He’s alive,” Kaylin replied, grimacing. “He’s not conscious, but he is alive.” She stood over the ungainly heap that Brecht usually became when he’d emptied too many bottles. Counted the empties beside him, and whistled. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to wake him up.”

  “Hang on,” Severn said. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Where you going?”

  “The old well.”

  She laughed. “Don’t forget a bucket. This isn’t the city market.”

  “Good point.”

  Brecht sputtered a lot when the water hit his face. He had to; he had been in the middle of a very noisy inhale. His eyes were red and round when they opened, and he grabbed an empty, cracking it on the hardwood of his personal chair. It shattered in about the right way, leaving him with a suitable weapon. Not that he was in any shape to wield one.