This wasn’t a good day.
She made the landing of the last set of stairs, stopped to catch her breath and shake her legs out and then straightened her shoulders, adjusting her sloppy belt. It was two notches too big, again. And she hadn’t had time to punch a few extra holes.
Her hair was a flyaway mess, and her cheeks, she knew, would be a little too red for dignity—but she often had to choose between dignity and living another hour. She paused at the unattended door, and placed her palm against the golden symbol of the hawk that adorned its lower center. It was a tall door.
Magic trickled up her hand like a painful, frosty flicker. She hated it, and gritted her teeth as it passed through her skin. Of all the things she had had to learn to accept with grace, this was the hardest: to leave her palm there while magic roved and quested, seeking answers.
It was apparently satisfied; the doors began to swing open.
They opened into a round, domed room: the height of the Tower, and the face it showed to all but the most trusted of the Hawklord’s advisors. Given what she knew about the Hawklord, that that number was higher than zero should have come as a big surprise.
She bowed before the doors had fully opened. Because she wore the uniform of a Hawk, a bow was required. Had she worn any other uniform, she’d probably have had to throw in a long grovel as well as a bit of scraping.
“Kaylin Neya,” the Hawklord said coldly.
She rose instantly.
Met his eyes. They were like gray stone, like the walls of the round room; they gave no impression of life, and they hinted at nothing but surface. His face, pale as ivory, heightened their unusual color; his hair, gray, fell beyond his back. He was not Barrani, but he might as well have been; he was tall, proud and very cold.
But his wings crested the rise of drawn hood, and they were white, their pinions folded. Hawklord. It was not because he was Aerian that he was Lord here.
“Hawklord,” she said.
His face grew more stonelike.
“Lord Grammayre,” she added.
“I have been waiting for half of a day, Kaylin. Would you care to offer an explanation for the waste of my time to the Emperor?”
Her shoulders fell about four inches, but she managed to keep her head up. “No, sir.”
He frowned, and then turned toward the distant curve of the shadowed room. In it, she saw a small well of light. And around that light, a man.
Some instinct made her reach for her daggers; they were utterly silent as they slid out of their sheaths. That had been a costly gift from a mage on Elani Street who’d had a little bit of difficulty with a loan shark.
“I have, however, no intention of embarrassing the Hawks by allowing you to speak on their behalf. I have a mission for you,” he added, “and because of its nature, I wish you to take backup.”
Great. She looked down at her boots, and the low edges of the one pair of pants she now owned that wasn’t war-zone material. “Lord Grammayre—”
“That was not, of course, a request.” He held out a hand in command, but not to her. “I would like to introduce you to one of your partners. You may recognize him; you may not. He has been seconded from the Wolves. Severn?”
She almost didn’t hear the words; they made no sense.
Because across the round room—a room that now seemed to have no ceiling, her vision had grown so focused—a man stepped into the sun’s light.
A man she recognized, although she hadn’t seen him for years. For seven years.
In utter silence, she threw the first dagger, and hit the ground running.
He was fast.
But he’d always been fast. His own long knife was in the air before she’d run half the distance that separated them; her thrown dagger glanced off it with a sonorous clang. Everything in the Hawk’s tower reverberated; there could be no hidden fights, here.
“Hello, Kaylin.”
She snarled. Words were lost; what remained was motion, movement, intent. She held the second dagger in her hand as she unsheathed the third; heard the Hawklord’s cold command at her back as if it were simple breeze in the open streets.
The open streets of the fiefs, almost a decade past.
His smile exposed teeth, the narrowing of eyes, the sudden tensing of shoulder and chest as he gathered motion, hoarding it.
Left hand out, she loosed a second dagger, and he parried it, but only barely. The third, she had at his chest before he could bring his knife down.
Too easy, she thought desperately. Too damn easy.
She looked up at his lazy smile and brought her dagger in.
Light blinded her. Light, it seemed, from the sound of his sudden curse, blinded him; they were driven apart by the invisible hands of the Hawklord’s power, and they were held fast, their feet inches above the ground.
Her eyes grew accustomed, by slow degree, to the darkness of the domed room.
“I see,” the Hawklord said quietly, “that you know Severn. Severn, you failed to mention this in your interview.”
Severn had always recovered quickly. “I didn’t recognize the name,” he said, voice even, smile still draped across his face. He moved slowly, very slowly, and sheathed his long knife, waiting.
And she looked up at his face. He wasn’t as tall as Tanner, and he wasn’t as broad; he had the catlike grace of a young Leontine, and his hair was a burnished copper, something that reddened in caught light. But his eyes were the blue she remembered, cold blue, and if he had new scars—and he did—they hadn’t changed his face enough to remove it from her memory.
“Kaylin?”
She said nothing for a long, long time. And given the tone of the Hawklord’s voice, it wasn’t a wise expenditure of that time.
“I know him,” she said at last.
“That has already been established.” The Hawk’s lips turned up in a cold smile. “You seldom attempt to kill a man for no reason in this tower. But not,” he added, “never.”
She ignored the comment. “He’s no Wolf,” she told the man who ruled the Hawks in all their guises. “I don’t care what he told you—he doesn’t serve the Wolflord.”
He chose to ignore her use of the Lord of Wolves, her more colloquial title. “Ah. And who does he serve, Kaylin?”
“One of the seven,” she said, spitting to the side.
“The seven?”
She was dead tired of his word games. “The fieflords,” she said.
“Ah. Severn?”
“I was a Wolf,” he replied, as if this bored him. As if everything did. He ran a hand through his hair; it was just shy of regulation length. “I served the Lord of Wolves.” Each word emphasized and correct.
“You’re lying.”
“Ask the Lord of Hawks,” he told her, with a shrug. “He’s got the paperwork.”
“No,” the Hawklord replied quietly, “I don’t.”
Severn was silent, assessing the tone of the Hawklord’s words. After a moment, he shrugged again; the folds of his robes shifted, and Kaylin heard the distinct sound of cloth rubbing against leather. He was not entirely unarmored here.
Too bad.
“I was a Shadow Wolf,” he said at last.
“For how long?” She refused to be shocked. Refused to let his admission slow her down.
“Years,” he replied. Just that.
She didn’t believe him. “He’s lying.”
“I didn’t say how many,” he added softly. As if it were a game.
“He is not lying,” the Hawklord told her. “Believe that when the unusual request for transfer between the Towers arrives, we check very carefully. When the man who requests the transfer is of the Shadows, our investigations are more thorough.”
“Thorough how?”
“We called in the Tha’alani.”
She froze. She had faced Tha’alani before, but only once, and she had been thirteen years old at the time. She had sworn, then, that she would die before she let one touch her again. The Tha’alani wer
e an obscenity; they touched not flesh—although that in and of itself caused her problems—but thought, mind, heart, all the hidden things.
All the things that had to stay hidden if they were to be protected.
They were sometimes called Truthseekers. But it was a paltry word. Kaylin privately preferred rapist as the more accurate term.
“He subjected himself to the Tha’alani willingly,” the Hawklord added.
“And the Tha’alani said he was telling the truth.”
“Indeed.”
“And what truth? What could he say that would make him worthy of the Hawks?”
But the Hawklord’s patience had ebbed. “Enough to satisfy the Lord of Hawks,” he told her. “Will you question me?”
No. Not if she wanted to be a Hawk. “Why? Why him?”
“Because, Kaylin, he is one of two men who understand the fiefs as well as you do.”
She froze.
“The other will be with us shortly.”
After about ten minutes, the Hawklord let them go. Mostly. The barrier that held Kaylin’s arms to her side slowly thinned; she could move as if she were under water. Given that she was likely to try to kill Severn again the minute she got the chance, she tried hard not to resent the Hawklord’s caution.
“Feel all better now that that’s out of your system?” Severn asked quietly.
She wanted to cut the lips off his face; it would ruin his smirk. “No.”
“No?”
“You’re not dead.”
He laughed and shook his head. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you Elianne?”
“Tell him to let us go and you can find that out for yourself.”
“I doubt the Lord of Hawks would take the orders of a former Shadow Wolf. Although given your tardiness and his apparent acceptance of it, he’s a damn site more tolerant than the Lord of Wolves was.”
“Try.”
He laughed again. “Not yet, little—what did he call you? Kaylin? Not yet.”
The Lord of Hawks watched them with the keen sight of their namesake.
“You want to send us into the fiefs,” she said at last, trying to keep the accusation out of her voice.
“Yes. It’s been seven years, Kaylin. Long enough.”
“Long enough for what? Three of the fieflords are outcaste Barrani—I could live and die in the time it took them to blink!”
The Hawklord turned his full attention upon her. “I think I have been overly tolerant,” he said at last, and in a tone of voice she hadn’t heard since she’d first arrived in this tower. “You are either Hawk or you are not. Decide.”
Her silence was enough of an answer, but only barely. “The third is coming now.”
The door, which had probably closed the moment Kaylin had fully stepped across its threshold, swung open again.
A man walked into the room. He wore no armor that she could hear beneath the full flow of his perfect robes. Her hearing had always been good. “Lord Grammayre,” he said, bowing low.
“Tiamaris,” the Hawklord replied. “I would like to introduce you to Kaylin and Severn. You will work with them.”
The man rose. His hair was a dark, dark black—Barrani black—but his build was all wrong for Barrani. He was a shade taller than Teela, and about twice her width. Three times, maybe. His hands were empty; he carried no obvious weapon. Wore no open medallion. The hand that he lifted in ritual greeting, palm out, was smooth and unadorned.
Kaylin and Severn could not likewise lift hand—but their background in the fiefs hadn’t made the gesture automatic. Lord Grammayre was under no such disadvantage; he lifted his ringed hand in greeting, and lowered his chin slightly.
“Tiamaris has some knowledge of the fiefs,” he told them both. Tiamaris lowered his perfectly raised hand, and turned to face them.
Something about the man’s eyes were all wrong; it took Kaylin a moment to realize what it was. They were orange. A deep, bright orange that hinted at red and gold. Her own eyes almost fell out of their sockets.
“You have the privilege,” Lord Grammayre told her quietly, “of meeting the only member of the Dragon caste to ever apply to serve in the Halls of Law.”
Severn recovered first. He laughed. “It’s true, then,” he said, to no one in particular.
That rankled. “Like you’d know true if it bit you on the ass.”
“You really are a mongrel unit.”
“No, Severn,” the Hawklord replied softly. Too softly. Had it been anyone else speaking, Kaylin might have dared a warning kick.
She hoped Severn hung himself instead.
Severn fell silent.
“The Hawks have always been open to those who seek service under the banner of the Emperor’s Law. Where service is offered it is accepted, by whoever offers it. Tiamaris has chosen to make that offer, and it has been accepted, by the Three Towers. And the Emperor. If the Wolves choose different criteria upon which to accept applicants, that is the business of the Lord of Wolves; if the Swords choose to retain only the mortal races, that is likewise the concern of their lord.
“I would, of course, be pleased to explain your mission. But I have spent precious hours in this tower, and I have other duties to which I must attend. The Lords of Law meet within the half hour.” He reached into the folds of his robes and pulled out a large gem.
Even Kaylin could see it glow.
He held it a moment in his open palm. “This contains all of the information the Hawks have been able to gather about your mission. Some of it was placed within the gem by the Tha’alani, some was placed there by Wolves and Swords. You will study it,” he added quietly, “and it will tell you all you require.
“If you have questions, contain them. You will have to find answers on your own. You will speak to no one of what you see within the gem. It is spellbound, and it will enforce that command.”
He hesitated a moment, and then, lifting his hand, he gestured. Kaylin fell an inch to the ground and stumbled, righting herself.
“Kaylin.”
She turned. Saw that he held out both his open hand and the large gem it contained—to her. For just a minute she considered the wisdom of a different occupation.
But her past would follow her out the doors; here it was hidden. Without a word, she held out a hand, and he dropped the crystal into the shaking curve of her palm. Blue light seared her vision; her fingers closed instinctively.
She was surprised when she didn’t throw it away.
“Interesting,” the Hawklord said softly. She thought he might say more, but the meeting with the Lords of Law clearly demanded his full attention. “You are dismissed,” he said quietly. “You may speak with Marcus. Tell him that you are to be equipped in any reasonable manner. Remind him that the equipment is not to be logged.
“That is all.”
CHAPTER 2
Judging by the quality of the silence, which had gone from absolute to cryptlike, Iron Jaw still hadn’t recovered his good humor, such as it was. The people who usually occupied the desks in line of sight seemed to have developed an extended case of lunch. Kaylin’s stomach really wanted to join them. Either that, or to lose the breakfast she hadn’t had. She couldn’t quite decide which.
Severn. Here. Her hands were fists, which, given that one of them was clutching something with sharp edges, was unfortunate. If it hadn’t been years since she’d badly wanted to kill someone—and face it, she wasn’t angelae—it had been years since she’d tried. Her timing, as always, was impeccable.
Marcus looked up from his paperwork. She wondered which poor sacrificial soul had delivered it. She didn’t envy them.
“Well?” He growled.
She shrugged. Not really safe, given his mood—but she was in a mood of her own. “We need a safe room,” she told him, waving the crystal she still clutched.
His brows rose, or rather, the fur above his eyes did. When it settled, he looked annoyed. Nothing new, there. “West room,” he said, curtly. “And those two?”
“Ask the Hawklord.”
His lip curled back over his teeth, and she decided that his mood trumped hers. “Severn,” she said curtly. “Formerly of the Wolves.”
“Here?”
“I said formerly.”
“And the other?”
“Tiamaris. He’s a…”
The low growl deepened. The Leontine slid around the desk, paperwork forgotten.
Tiamaris stood his ground. Stood it with such complete confidence, Kaylin wondered if anything ever shook him.
“That’s a caste name, isn’t it?” the Leontine asked.
“That is none of your concern, Sergeant Kassan,” Tiamaris replied. His voice gave nothing away. Kaylin was impressed. Not that he knew Marcus’s rank—anyone who knew the uniform could see that—but that he knew his pride name.
Marcus drew closer, and as he did, he gained height—or at least his fur did. It was a Leontine trait, when the Leon-tine felt threatened. That usually only happened in the presence of his wives or his kits.
Severn sat on an empty desk and folded arms across his chest, smirking. Kaylin almost joined him. Almost.
But she didn’t want to be where he was; she had decided that a long time ago. Wouldn’t think about it here, because if by some miracle Marcus didn’t go feral, she might, and she didn’t want to be the cause of an office death. Not when the Hawklord had made clear what the price of that death would be.
“Tiamaris, you said?” Marcus’s growl could sometimes be mistaken for a purr. Kaylin kept a flinch in check as she realized Iron Jaw was actually speaking Barrani. It was the formal language of the Lords of Law, and as he was allergic to most forms of formal, he seldom used it.
Tiamaris raised a dark brow. They were almost of a height. Marcus continued to close; Tiamaris continued to mime a statue. Inches fell away.
Men. “Actually, Marcus, I said it,” Kaylin lifted the crystal as if it were an Imperial writ.
To her surprise, Marcus actually turned to look at her. But if his gaze was fastened on the crystal she held, his words were for Tiamaris. “This is my office,” he said quietly, each word textured by the full growl of a Leontine in his prime. “These are my Hawks. If you…choose to work here, you accept that.”
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