Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  Kaylin nodded.

  “But you look like you could have kept that up for hours.”

  “Maybe hour. You’ve fought one of those before?”

  “Hell no. Do I look like I’m dead?” She glanced at Tiamaris. But Morse generally didn’t offer thanks to anyone, so she didn’t actually speak to him. “You’re lucky we’re not on a tight schedule,” she finally said.

  “Oh?”

  “If we were, we’d be late. Barren’s always been big on punctuality.”

  “Big word,” Kaylin said, falling in step beside Morse as Morse began to walk.

  “Learn something, you hang around important men like Barren,” Morse replied.

  Kaylin nodded. She certainly had. “Anything worth learning?”

  Morse chuckled. It was not a happy sound. “Same as always.” She walked another two blocks before she stopped, wincing.

  “Ribs?” Kaylin asked quietly.

  “All there. Might not all be in one piece. Look, Eli, you’ve seen what we’re facing.”

  “You said you hadn’t seen—”

  “I haven’t. But then again, the big ones? They don’t often come in exactly the same shape or size. They don’t make the same noises. Some talk. Some don’t. They can be killed,” she added, “but it gets harder and harder with time. That was something special.” She spit to one side to underline the last word. “Doesn’t matter. You’ve seen it, you understand what it means.

  “You still want to talk to Barren?”

  “I never wanted to talk to Barren,” Kaylin replied. “Not then. Not now.”

  “Go home.”

  “Can’t.”

  Morse shrugged. “Your life, Eli. No one has to know you came this way.”

  Four people already did. She started to mention this, remembered who she was talking to, and stopped. Morse could kill them without blinking or breaking a sweat, and they both knew it. She was offering to do that now.

  Kaylin owed them nothing. Less than nothing, really. But she shook her head. “You’re not going to like this much,” she told Morse, “but Barren is our last line of defense. We don’t stop whatever is causing this problem, and those creatures are going to be eating their way through the rest of the city. The rest of the city,” she added, touching the Hawk on her chest, “hasn’t had years of ferals and nighttime curfews to get them ready for this kind of thing.”

  Morse grinned. “I know. It’s the only thing that makes facing my own death bearable.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Elianne had been with Morse for six weeks before Morse took her to see Barren the first time. Six weeks of training, albeit not the variety of training she’d see later with the Hawks. She’d learned how to hold a knife, and how to use it a little, in the years she’d lived with Severn, but Severn had never intended her to fight.

  He’d never intended her to kill.

  Morse was not Severn. Not to look at and not to live with. She’d given Elianne her first throwing daggers, and she’d taught her how to use them. She’d said nothing about self-defense; she only cared about Elianne’s aim. And her arm strength. “Scrawny arms like that, and it doesn’t matter how well you throw; dagger’s going to go an inch through flesh, and it won’t scratch shit out of armor.”

  Morse had occupied a large flat in a run-down building by Buckler. Her neighbors were quiet and well behaved, at least around Morse. Morse had taken the time to introduce them all to Elianne; she hadn’t bothered to introduce Elianne to them. Their names, Morse reasoned, weren’t important—they were nobody.

  “I work for Barren,” Morse told her, “and they all know it. You work for me, and they now know that, too. They give you any trouble, it’s the last thing they’ll do.”

  Elianne had nodded, and Morse grinned. “You want at least one of them to step out of line, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Practice.”

  Morse had asked her, “Who was he?” at the start of their third week of training. Elianne, who had come in from a run in Barren, and now sagged against the wall completely winded, had taken her time replying. She’d known enough then to emphasize her lack of breath; Morse wasn’t patient, and if angered, she’d let fly with either harsh words or the back of her hand.

  “Who?”

  “The guy. The one you want to kill.”

  “I thought he was a friend,” Elianne had replied.

  “A friend?”

  “I can’t remember when I didn’t know him. He was there before my mom died.”

  Morse shrugged. “How old were you?”

  “Five, I think.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Ten.”

  “But he took care of you.”

  Elianne had nodded. “Yeah. He took care of me. Taught me how to look pathetic and cute, if it would help; taught me how to steal, when it wouldn’t. Even taught me how to know the difference.” She rose and began to walk; the first two days Morse had taken them out on a run, her legs had cramped horribly after they’d finally stopped moving. “I trusted him,” she told Morse.

  “Yeah,” Morse said. “We’re all stupid once. If we’re lucky, we survive it. If we’re good, they don’t. What’d he do to you?”

  Elianne closed her eyes.

  “Eli?”

  And opened them to the streets of Barren, seven years later. “Sorry. Thinking.”

  “Didn’t look like thought.”

  Kaylin shrugged. “What passes for thought, these days. I remember the first time you took me to see Barren.”

  Morse didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “You got any more weapons?”

  Kaylin, suddenly hit with an image of the quartermaster, winced. “There wasn’t much left of the blades. I should have kept them anyway.”

  Morse shrugged. “Why?”

  Explaining the quartermaster to Morse was not high on the list of priorities for the day. Any day. Tiamaris, however, handed her two knives. They weren’t regulation wear, but they had their own sheaths. “For now,” he told her. “And I will make the quartermaster seem like a lamb if you lose them.”

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  “Casualties of battle are not the same as a loss.”

  “If you ever get tired of Court,” she told him with a grimace, “you’ve got a career as a quartermaster ahead of you.”

  The streets were empty. Even empty, they became familiar as Kaylin walked them. Maybe it was because she walked them with Morse; she couldn’t quite say. She hadn’t lived here long enough to know them as well as she knew Nightshade’s—but Nightshade had been her childhood home, and until the last day of her life in it, she had managed to find ways to be happy living there.

  There was no happiness in Barren. Barren, she thought, had lived up to its name, although her rage and her guilt hadn’t let her be that ironic at the time. What would she say to her younger self, if she met her in these streets?

  And what would that younger self say to her, if she knew that Severn was not only still alive, but her partner? I want to be able to kill a man. She’d tried. But she wasn’t still trying. Some days she woke from the nightmares of Steffi and Jade’s deaths. But they vanished into the past; they no longer withstood sunlight by chilling her until she could feel nothing else at all.

  Barren’s memory, however, was not theirs.

  Morse raised a brow. On her face, it looked like a twist, but everything about Morse seemed twisted. “You worried?”

  Kaylin shook her head.

  Morse snorted. “You were always crap at lying.”

  “And you,” Kaylin shot back, “were always good at asking questions you already knew the answers to. If you know, why bother?”

  “Maybe it’s a test.”

  “I suck at those. Trust me.”

  “Only the small ones. You suck at the big ones, you’d already be dead.”

  Kaylin shrugged. Coming from Morse, that was almost embarrassingly glowing praise. “I’m not afraid of him now,” she said, voi
ce low.

  Morse stopped for a moment. “You’re not thirteen anymore.”

  “No.”

  “He won’t touch you, much. You’re marked,” she added. “He can’t afford to piss off Nightshade. Not now.”

  As if, Kaylin thought, Morse could see right through her. She frowned. “Morse?”

  “What?” Morse started to walk.

  “How old were you when Barren found you?”

  “Older than you.”

  “Than I was?”

  “Yeah. Older, smarter. But he was new, then,” she added. “He had a lot to prove, but he had to prove it in a way that didn’t deplete his ranks.”

  Kaylin frowned. “Morse?”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember Illien?”

  Morse froze, then. Just froze. “Where’d you hear that name?”

  “Nightshade told me. Lord Nightshade,” Kaylin added with a shrug. When Morse raised a brow, she said, “He’s the fief lord. He’s also Barrani. They like their titles.”

  “Yeah,” Morse replied after a pause. “I remember Illien.”

  “You met him?”

  “No. You weren’t born here,” Morse added quietly, “or you’d know the answer to the question. You wouldn’t need to ask. I never met him. I’m still alive.”

  She nodded. That had been how she’d felt about Nightshade, growing up in the streets of his fief. But she’d met him, and she was still alive. How much of Morse’s response was that primal, certain fear, and how much of it was fact? “Was Illien human?”

  “With a name like that?”

  That would be no.

  “How did Barren kill him?”

  Morse stopped walking again, and then she laughed. “Since you’re so fond of questions, why don’t you ask Barren?”

  Which meant, Kaylin thought sourly, that it was exactly the wrong thing to ask Barren—unless she wanted to enrage him. She glanced at Tiamaris. Tiamaris did not do her the favor of returning it. He was watching Morse closely, although he wasn’t openly staring. “Perhaps,” he said at length, “I will spare the Private the embarrassment of asking such an obvious question. By asking it,” he added, “myself.”

  Having seen Tiamaris fight, Morse had nothing to say to that; she shrugged. “I should warn you,” she told the Dragon Lord, “that Barren may be human, but he’s got power.”

  Tiamaris did not condescend to reply; his silence had Dragon arrogance written all over it. Kaylin didn’t speak because some treacherous part of herself wanted to see him square off against Barren.

  Barren didn’t live in the heart of the fief. He lived—he had always lived—near its edge. She’d wondered about that, when Morse had first brought her here. But then, at thirteen, she hadn’t known about the heart of the fiefs, and she hadn’t seen what could emerge from them; it hadn’t occurred to her that ferals weren’t actually alive.

  But if he didn’t live in the fief’s heart, he didn’t live in a hovel, either—not that any of the buildings in Barren could be said to be grand or ostentatious. There was, on these streets, some evidence that previous generations of Elantrans—with money, even—had chosen to build homes here. Most of those buildings were in disrepair; one of them was not.

  It was to that familiar building that Morse now led them. And she did lead; at some point—Kaylin wasn’t certain when—she had fallen behind in her step. But Barren’s White Towers, which was what he called his residence, now loomed in the distance a few blocks away. There were flags flying atop the two, squat ends of the building; they weren’t, in any real sense, Towers. But they were three stories tall, and given that anything else that tall had probably crumbled or fallen into a state of shoddy neglect, they stood out.

  The building was fenced, and the fence—unlike the fence that had opened so fortuitously on the night that Kaylin had run here—was in solid, even shining repair; there was a functional guardhouse which was probably not more than nine years old. Someone—she wasn’t sure who—had even sheared the grass, and if there were no flower beds, there were standing trees that didn’t look too badly in need of pruning.

  But the guards, rather than looking like the official adornments that often accompanied a gatehouse, looked as if they’d seen action; their armor was scuffed, and it was entirely practical. They didn’t have tabards—but in Barren, they wouldn’t—but they had that undershaven, underslept look that Kaylin associated with stakeouts and trouble. There were also more of them than Kaylin remembered.

  Tiamaris nodded toward the building. “This is where Barren lives?”

  Kaylin nodded. “It hasn’t changed much,” she added quietly. “And at least it doesn’t have cages and a gallows.”

  “Lord Nightshade always did have a penchant for the melodramatic,” was the Dragon Lord’s reply. “It is not entirely necessary, however.”

  “No,” she replied. “Morse?”

  “Waiting for the two of you to finish jabbering. Barren never likes the sound of any voice that isn’t his.”

  True enough. Kaylin took a breath and stopped talking. Morse didn’t ask her if she was ready; she was here. It was too late to change that. But she did walk up to the gatehouse. The guards—none of whom Kaylin recognized—nodded at Morse. They gave Kaylin the once-over, sneered openly at the Hawk, and then glanced at Tiamaris. Give them this much, she thought, they don’t look bored.

  From their reaction, only one of them recognized Tiamaris for what he was. The other three? They assumed he was, like Kaylin, a Hawk. The Law wasn’t much feared in any of the fiefs, but it wasn’t generally subject to this kind of open contempt.

  She seriously hoped they’d keep their mouths shut. She could take it—more or less, and when she felt like it—but Dragon dignity was a finicky and unpredictable thing. Morse said nothing at all, but they must have seen something in her nonexpression, because they finally nodded and let them all through.

  They didn’t all stay at the gatehouse; they sent a runner.

  The runner moved far more quickly than Kaylin, Morse or Tiamaris, even though the distance from the fence to the house wasn’t that long. The doors opened just as they reached them. A bristling row of guards—two abreast, and three deep—greeted them.

  “We’ll take over from here,” one of them told Morse.

  Morse shrugged.

  “And you,” he added, pointing to Tiamaris, “are to wait outside.”

  Morse grinned. “Good luck with that,” she told the guard. “I’ll just step back and see how it works out for you.”

  Even the most dense or stupid of men wouldn’t have misinterpreted Morse’s amused malice; this guard was neither. He turned to Kaylin and said, “Ask him to wait outside.”

  Kaylin now shrugged, mimicking Morse. “I can’t,” she told him blandly. “He’s an officer.” She glanced at Tiamaris.

  His eyes had shaded to orange, and he lowered his membranes to make this difference clear. The man who was speaking, and who Kaylin therefore assumed was in charge, took a step back. He stopped before he hit the man behind him, and turned and whispered something quickly.

  The man then pushed his way through the rest of the guards and headed up the stairs. They were set well back, and there was enough room in this entrance for a real fight, swords and all; the ceiling here ran the full three stories of the building. But no one drew a sword; no one drew even as much as a dagger.

  When the man clanked his way back down the stairs, he spoke to the guard.

  “All right,” the man told Tiamaris. “You’ve got permission to enter.”

  Tiamaris said nothing at all, but his eyes did not shade back to their familiar gold. He did, however, raise his inner membranes, muting the clearest sign of Dragon temper. The guards spread out, losing their look of uniformity, and with it, any suggestion of real training. They took front and back when they reached the stairs, and Kaylin and Tiamaris formed up in the middle.

  Together they were escorted up the staircase and down the long and impressive hall
that led to Barren’s office. The doors were closed, and Kaylin saw with a grimace that they were warded—something new, and something she didn’t see much of at all in the fiefs. But it wasn’t her palm that was going to do the stinging; a guard reached out and touched it.

  The doors rolled open, and seated behind a large and completely clear desk, sat Barren, Lord of the fief.

  Almost seven years had passed since she’d last seen him behind that desk. Seven years, most of them spent tagging along underfoot of one Hawk or another. She wasn’t scrawny in the same way she’d been then, and she wasn’t a child. She tried to see Barren from that perspective, while her hands curled in loose fists and her mouth went dry.

  He was, seated, not a tall man; when he rose—and he would, she thought—he was slightly taller than Tiamaris. He wasn’t fat, and he wasn’t old; he was older, and he had one new scar that ran the length of his cheek. It hadn’t faded to white, but it didn’t make him look any worse. His hair, which had always been a shade of pale gold, hadn’t obviously grayed; his skin was dark, but he’d just passed through summer.

  His eyes were still blue, and at that, the gray-blue that always seemed so unfriendly. And his hands were still that square, callused set of hands; he held a dagger in one as if it were just a piece of jewelry. He was not, however, ostentatiously dressed in any way; that wasn’t his style. He also didn’t wear armor, at least not in the Towers. When he went out in the streets, he usually did.

  “Welcome back, Elianne,” he said, and at that point, he did unfold. “You’re looking well.”

  She said nothing, and he frowned.

  “Did you miss Barren?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged slightly. Smiled. It was, as far as smiles went, much a match for Morse’s. “I hear that the Hawklord is still alive.”

  “There’s always a Hawklord,” she replied, keeping her voice even.

  “But it’s the man who’s ruled the Hawks for the past—how many?—several years.”

  She shrugged. It was a fief gesture. She kept her expression as even and neutral as possible as he came out from behind his desk. When he didn’t speak, she said, “You wanted to speak to me.”