Cast in Shadow

by Michelle Sagara

  Choice. She bit her lip and nodded.

  Extending her arms, she stepped toward the mirror and touched the closest surface with the tips of her fingers. She stared at the symbols that were part of her skin, and drew them out, not speaking, no longer trying. They danced there, trapped and aging, and she caught them.

  Tiamaris spoke. She didn’t understand what he said.

  But she didn’t need to.

  She could see the shadows seep from her skin into the mirror, part of her, and not part of her; could see them questing and struggling across a foreign landscape, flat and cold; could see them, at last, come to rest, to spread and deepen, gathering and dousing light, until only they remained.

  She could almost feel their hunger; she could certainly feel their cold, their quest for warmth. Something sharp moved her; it was almost like pity. Except for the anger, the bitter, bitter anger, that followed.

  “There,” she said softly, and for just the space of that word, she could have been speaking her native tongue, Barrani or Leontine; they were equally alien.

  “Kaylin.” Severn’s voice. Severn, not Barrani, not Dragon. She turned to look at him, then. Saw his expression, unguarded, the stillness in his face jarring.

  She closed her eyes, pulled her hands away, lost the thread of words that were not her words, but part of her anyway, and looked.

  The shadow covered a city block, and at its heart, waiting, something that spun that shadow, spreading it.

  “What is it?” Severn asked her.

  She shook her head. “I—I—”

  “She doesn’t know.” Lord Nightshade looked beyond them both, and met the whirling red of unlidded Dragon gaze. “Lord Tiamaris?”

  “It…is not possible.”

  “Tiamaris?”

  He didn’t answer. Kaylin hesitated for another heartbeat—and heartbeats had never seemed so long—before she touched the mirror with the flat of both palms and twisted.

  “Lord Grammayre!”

  In the flat of the surface of a single pane, the Hawklord looked back from the heights of the Aerie. “Kaylin?” It wasn’t the first time she’d surprised him, but it was one of very, very few.

  She could see, behind him, something on the wall; it was flat. He wasn’t in the Tower.

  “Records,” she said, in a voice only slightly less intense. “Capture this image.” She fed it the shadowed block.

  “Records, display,” the Hawklord said.

  She had only once seen the Hawklord’s wings snap up and out in the way they did now. It had almost killed her. “Yes,” she said, seeing what he was seeing. “I need the Hawks. I need them there.”

  “Summoned,” he told her, lifting both his hand and his voice. “Don’t do anything foolish, Kaylin—”

  She shattered the image, and turned to Severn.

  “Do you need all of those daggers?”

  CHAPTER 19

  “The daggers,” Lord Nightshade said softly, “are unlikely to be of use.”

  As she’d seen that for herself, she couldn’t offer much of an argument, but she hated to be without a weapon.

  Severn unbuckled the belt that held his daggers; he didn’t wear arm sheaths. “Take them,” he said. “I won’t be using them.” And he began to unwind the long chain.

  Lord Nightshade watched the play of light against the links; it scattered, and the mirror returned the pieces, oddly contorted. Which, Kaylin thought, was about what you could expect from enchanted mirrors of a certain quality: they noticed things you couldn’t. Well, that she couldn’t, anyway. “You were not taught the use of that weapon by a mortal,” the fieflord said, after a pause.

  Severn shrugged.

  “Nor was it made by one.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  The fieflord’s lips thinned in frown. But he let it pass. “I am unused to allies,” he told Kaylin. “And I work well alone. But I will meet you there.” He paused, and then added, “Lord Tiamaris, I trust you know the way out?”

  “I have found my way out of Castle Nightshade once before,” the Dragon replied. “I trust that this time, my exit will be less contested?”

  Barrani smiles were never warm. But the fieflord’s was probably as close as they came; whatever past experience existed between them, Dragon and fieflord, amused him. “My men will be otherwise occupied.” He reached out, and touched the surface of one silvered pane. It was not the pane that held the location of the shadows.

  No image greeted that touch, or if one did, it was meant for the fieflord, and only the fieflord. “Ready my armor,” he said. “And my sword. Gather in the courtyard, and do not tarry.” He stepped toward the mirror, and passed through it, leaving them alone in the room.

  “You know,” Kaylin said, as the last of his cloak was swallowed, “I think I want one of those.”

  “No you don’t,” Severn replied, with the hint of a smile. “They’re really not safe to use when you’ve been drinking. You have no idea where you’ll end up.”

  Kaylin ran. The lack of armor, of anything confining, made her step lighter, her stride longer, than it usually was in an emergency. This meant that she wasn’t left behind.

  She had expected Barrani guards to be waiting around the corner, but the halls were cavernous in their emptiness.

  Tiamaris did not lead; he followed Kaylin instead. “Kaylin,” he told her, when she paused, “the fieflord has not yet finished with you.”

  She nodded, her thoughts elsewhere. “You can’t go Dragon again, can you?”

  “I can, as you so quaintly put it, ‘go Dragon,’” he said, “but not without cost.” From his tone, she didn’t think the cost political. And because he was a Dragon, she didn’t ask.

  “How can we fight them, then?”

  “Fire.” He lifted an arm. “That hall.”

  “We don’t have fire,” she replied, as she caught sight of the light of candles, and the familiar curve of ceiling beneath which they burned. She made her way toward it.

  “We don’t,” he agreed. “But the Hawks will not come unprepared.” His smile was a momentary thing. “I have not seen Lord Grammayre in flight for some time.”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.”

  “You will.”

  She would have replied, but the door swallowed her and spit her out before she could frame words.

  She hit the ground swearing, rolled and came up unsteadily on her feet. The passage into the Castle had been so smooth, she’d expected the exit to go almost unnoticed.

  Severn and Tiamaris fared better.

  “He did that on purpose.”

  “I doubt it,” Tiamaris replied. “And that was an impressive display of linguistic talent. It is unfortunate that it was so…limited in content.”

  “Sorry. I’d have added something in Dragon, but you’re the only Dragon I know, and you don’t swear much.”

  “If you are very lucky, that will continue to be the case.” He lifted a brow. “Look,” he said, and pointed.

  She looked up. Even at this distance, she could see clearly that the sky was full of Aerians. The Hawklord had emptied the Aerie. She smiled. “Come on. We’ve got half a chance to beat them there.”

  Severn was already running.

  They ran in the shadows of the fief’s taller buildings; it was like a mininight of its own. If the fieflord’s men had chosen the same route—and they knew the fief easily as well as Severn or Kaylin did—they moved quickly enough that they were far and away ahead. Kaylin had to remind herself that it wasn’t a race.

  But it was. She had to pause for breath, and Severn was half a block ahead before he noticed; he ran back, frowning.

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing.” The exhaustion of using her power was beginning to make itself felt. She willed herself to ignore it.

  “Kaylin, we’re in Nightshade. Your body is now covered with writing that neither of us can read, and you just manipulated mirrors that are probably personally keyed to the fieflord in ways tha
t neither of us can imagine. You’ve been bathed in magical fire, you’ve spent half the day running and you probably haven’t eaten anything.”

  “And you did?”

  “I was with Moran.”

  She grimaced. Unfortunately, her stomach agreed with Severn. “I’m not a wolf,” she said at last. “I guess I’m not used to running.”

  He told her to do something that was anatomically impossible. In Aerian. She laughed out loud. “I don’t even have wings,” she said, as she straightened her shoulders.

  “It’s not lack of training,” he said. He caught her by the shoulders, swung her around, and forced her chin up; his chain batted against her shirt, a reminder that she wore no armor.

  He knew her almost better than she knew herself. Seven years, and none, passed between them. “I’m—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is.”

  Tiamaris joined them quietly. “Severn?”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “He means,” Kaylin added, “more wrong.” But the weakness in her limbs was almost a blessing—she should barely be conscious. Had the Old One somehow given her a reprieve?

  The Dragon offered a rare smile. Without another word, he lifted Kaylin off her feet. She would have said something—and at that, something rude—but her arms and her legs were tingling, and that took the edge off her pride.

  The streets passed beneath their feet as she rested against the broad chest of Dragon, her eyes on the sky.

  The fire that lanced from ground to sky was a spectacle. It was hidden in part by the facade of old buildings, by the cramped quarters in which the poorer part of the fief huddled. But Kaylin could see the sudden orange glow, the tongues of leaping fire that sun didn’t cast, and had she been running, well, she wouldn’t be.

  Tiamaris had nature’s affinity for flame; either that, or as a Dragon, he was immune to it. He certainly wasn’t bothered by it. Nothing about its presence gave him pause. Then again, neither had the dead Barrani, and he had known, before either Kaylin or Severn had, exactly what he faced.

  “It appears,” Tiamaris said, as the fires grew brighter, the orange melding into a sustained white, “that Lord Nightshade moves swiftly when he has cause.” He stopped running and set Kaylin on her feet. “And it appears,” he said, as she found those feet, and they rounded the corner onto Mayburn street, “that our enemies are not willing to be caught unprepared a second time.”

  “How do you know it’s the fieflord?”

  “Because it is his magic,” the Dragon replied. “And the Hawks above have only just begun to circle. I do not think the ground Hawks have yet breached the fief.” He drew his sword. It looked a lot like a dagger in his hand, straight and two-edged.

  Not that she had time to really examine it; fire demanded most of her attention, partly because it was attached to moving people. And they didn’t seem keen on burning.

  In fact, to her dismay, they didn’t seem to be burning. The fire followed them, clinging as it could to their surcoats, their hair; it was reflected in their eyes and by their swords. But it seemed to touch only those things; it didn’t stop the swords from swinging.

  Barrani, she thought, seeing them. It was possible to tell which were Nightshade’s and which were not because of the fire; these Barrani were faster than the ones in the robes had been. There were similarities though; they didn’t seem to notice the loss of a limb if it wasn’t the one attached to their weapon.

  She counted. It had been part of her basic training, this act of counting things in motion. She’d passed because it had been practical. And because she’d passed, she was here, in the streets of a fief she had promised herself she wouldn’t return to, the numbers adding up to something she didn’t like.

  “Severn?” What Nightshade’s Barrani couldn’t do, they didn’t have a hope in hell of doing themselves. And the enemy was in front of the only doors she could see. All four of them. The fighting had not yet spread to the doorways themselves. There were too many.

  “Ahead of you,” he said. “They can’t occupy the whole block. Which building, Kaylin?” All of the words sharp, pointed.

  She couldn’t say. The map had seemed so damn clear at the time, the shadows so prominent, it hadn’t even occurred to Kaylin that it was possible not to know the answer. She did what came naturally in the fiefs; she slipped back into the shadowed street they’d barely left.

  Think, damn it. Think.

  “Was Nightshade there?” she asked Tiamaris. The Dragon shook his head. “Okay. Let’s go round the back.”

  “And hope that there is one.”

  Mayburn was long and narrow; it was, as most of the old roads were, punctuated by stone, rather than smoothed by it. There was a well along Mayburn, just a half block up from Triberry, the road they now followed. Behind Mayburn, parallel to it, was Culvert Road—which, like many of the fief’s street names, had no meaning now.

  Kaylin stopped at the well.

  It was, as far as wells go, in decent repair, and it was obviously in use, given the season—but it wasn’t thirst that stopped her. It was the woman; she was nestled in the lee of the rounded stone. Or she appeared to be. But Kaylin was a Hawk.

  “Leave her,” Tiamaris said quietly. “She’s dead.”

  Kaylin heard him, but didn’t take the time to argue. She changed her running stance, lowering herself almost to the ground, as if something as simple as a crossbow bolt could come out of any of the higher windows. She reached the woman at the same time Severn did, and she flinched.

  He looked at her, aware of the motion, of what it might mean.

  The woman should have been dead. But she wasn’t.

  Whoever had stabbed her—and it was a long, clean wound—had missed her heart. Not, from the blood that fled her lips, other vital organs. Her hands were red and wet, evenly gloved in red liquid.

  Kaylin’s arms hurt. But not as much as this stranger did, and the one pain overwhelmed the other. She slid her arms around the woman’s shoulders, bent her head over the slack face, as if, for a moment, protecting it from witnesses. Spectators.

  Severn touched her shoulder, but did not speak; Tiamaris, she was no longer aware of. “Can you do this?” Severn asked softly. She knew what he meant. Not the saving of the life, but the ability to do anything else afterward.

  Before she could answer—if there was one—his fingers briefly tightened. It was his way of acknowledging the other question that he hadn’t asked. Can you walk away?

  This close to another person’s face, vision blurred; Kaylin had no need to shut her eyes. She felt the power trickle down her arms, into her hands; those hands were pressed against shoulder and chest. The woman was larger than Kaylin, but curled in on herself as she was, the difference wasn’t as significant as it would have been if they had tried to move her.

  “She’s lost a lot of blood.” Her words. Clinical.

  Severn said, “There are no medics here, but if you think you can hold on to her, there are a lot of Aerians.”

  She bit her lip, nodded, and let the power go. Unlike the healing with Catti, this was at least familiar. When the midwives called her, it was often because they thought they would lose mother—and child—to bleeding. They weren’t always right, but they were right often enough.

  That was harder than this. Blood from a bad birth came from a jagged wound, several layers of torn flesh. It wasn’t as clean. But her response was the same.

  First, stop the bleeding.

  Second, try to get the heart to work a little bit harder to replace the blood. Change something here, there, give something a little push.

  She tried not to hear the screaming in the distance, because it was distant. The fieflord was in the streets. The Hawklord was above them. They could take care of things for just a little bit longer.

  She finished the first; it wasn’t actually hard, because, given life, time would do as good a job as she did now—messy, but functional. She just didn’t have time of her own to do more.
>
  But before she had finished the real work, the woman’s face moved, her forehead jerking forward so suddenly, she clipped Kaylin’s jaw. Kaylin caught the woman’s hands as she tried to push herself up.

  “My daughter,” the woman said. Her voice wasn’t strong, but it was low and intense; the words cut.

  Severn knelt by her side. “We’re here,” he told the woman, in a much firmer voice than Kaylin could muster, “to save your child.”

  The woman had clearly lived in the fiefs for all of her life; suspicion and desperation wrestled for control of her features, and desperation won. It was close.

  “We’re Hawks,” Severn continued, meeting and holding the wild gaze. “Look.” And he pointed to the skies. To the Aerians that Kaylin had spent her adult life envying.

  The woman’s gaze was fleeting; it grazed sky, no more. But her hand rose, shaking, to touch the emblem emblazoned across Severn’s surcoat.

  Tiamaris came at last, and he bent, but did not kneel. “Tell us,” he said, “where they took your daughter.”

  The woman lifted her hand and pointed.

  Tiamaris lifted Kaylin by the arm. “Can you walk?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you run?”

  Nodded again. Her hands were sticky, and she wiped them absently against the thighs of unfamiliar pants.

  “It’s the third building,” Severn said quietly. He let the chain drop from one hand, shifting his grip. “There’s fighting,” he added.

  “I can see that.” It wasn’t as bad as Mayburn. Two dozen Barrani, of either persuasion, were scattered along the relevant length of Culvert road. Most were wielding swords; some were wearing fire.

  Something tugged at her—from the inside. “Nightshade’s there,” she said.

  Tiamaris, looking every inch the grim Dragon Lord, Hawk or no Hawk across his chest, nodded.

  “Tiamaris?”

  “He is there.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Kaylin moved away from the well. Her eyes narrowed; they didn’t have the depth of vision that Dragon eyes clearly had; she really had to look to find the fieflord. But when she did, she wondered why it had taken so long. He wore armor; he wore shin splints, his forearms were plated, and his hair was his only cape.