“I see the Aerie.” His voice was soft; he didn’t trust what he saw.
Fair enough. In this place, trusting what you saw was probably death. She continued down the passage. Tiamaris stepped beside her as it widened, and they walked two abreast, following its gentle, upward slope. She frowned, and slowed.
“Private?”
“I don’t remember the passages sloping up like this.”
“That,” he replied gravely, “is unfortunate, because I do.”
“You’ve been in the Aerie? But how did you get—”
“Not the Aerian one. Aerie is, in fact, a more general word.” His smile, in the scant light, was all teeth, and they looked preternaturally sharp. “I was born in one.”
“This isn’t—”
He lifted his head and fire spread itself in a thin, orange veil across the nubbled height of the ceiling. Above their head, writing appeared in glowing, gold letters. They were Barrani words, but they weren’t sentences; they were single runes. Sun. Wings. Claws. It looked like a child’s vocabulary.
Her eyes narrowed slightly as the letters dimmed.
“They’re sensitive to heat,” Tiamaris said, also gazing up. “And were meant to encourage the very young to use their breath. Learning to do so, and exercising the ability, is onerous for the young, and the young are famously lazy.”
“But these halls are people sized.”
“Their breath is not the only ability they were encouraged to use,” he replied. “And many games were played in mazes such as these, and just beyond. Hiding, if you will. One of the old Dragons who was famously indulgent used to chase us. We’d lie in wait, thinking ourselves very clever while we planned ambush after ambush.
“You cannot imagine how cramped the smaller tunnels became,” he added, in a tone of voice she had never heard him use. “And during one of those occupations, a number of hatchlings became stuck. There was quite a ruckus before they pulled down a small part of the wall.”
“The hatchlings could pull down a wall?”
“Not an entire wall, no. But enough of one.” He lowered his gaze. “These halls remind me of those ones. I do not think it accidental.”
“But it’s the Southern Ridge.”
“Yes. And I think that no accident, either. Let me make a suggestion. When the halls are familiar to me, I will lead. Where they differ, we can confer.” He led. She followed.
The halls were an amalgamation of a Dragon’s memories and a human’s, and the human memory was sketchy, at best. Kaylin took mental note of the shifts and changes, puzzling her way to something that she hoped would resemble an explanation at the end of their walk.
When they reached the foot of the stairs, however, she stopped. There had been no stairs—that she could recall—in the Aerie. “Tiamaris?”
“I believe, if you study them—” and here, he brightened the magical light “—you will recognize them. The guardrails—and attendant guards—are absent, and the walls are entirely wrong, but the design of the steps, the width, and the height, you should know.”
She didn’t spend a lot of time studying—or measuring—staircases. She usually ran up—or down—them, in a blind rush to get somewhere else. Instead of telling him as much, she backed up, jostling Severn and Nightshade as she did. “Sec,” she told them, and she made a direct run at, and up, the stairs.
And yes, steps beneath her boots, she did recognize them. They were the Tower stairs in the Halls of Law. She had run up them, late, more times than she cared to remember; she had all but crawled down them after interminably long debriefings in which she felt about as appreciated as a cockroach, albeit in better shape. She took the turns the same way she always did; she didn’t stumble and she didn’t find that they opened up into any strange passages.
But she did stop before she reached the top, and she turned to glance back. Tiamaris looked like thunder would if it had a face.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
She mumbled an apology. “I wanted to see if they were the right stairs,” she said, by way of explanation. If he’d been her teacher, she’d have failed the course on the spot. “But you’re right—these are the stairs to the Hawklord’s Tower.”
“Which we do not currently inhabit. You have no idea what could have met you on the stairs on your run up.” He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. The stairs rumbled with the force of his words.
She mumbled another apology. He glared. But he joined her, and he allowed her to walk a step—not more—ahead of him. She climbed; everyone else followed. But they followed in silence, like natural shadow, until they reached the flat landing in front of the Hawklord’s doors. The doors were familiar; they were well cared for, but showed age as if age were majesty. And they sported the doorward that she had come to hate during her first week here.
No, not here. Not here.
She lifted a hand; it hovered above the ward that crossed the closed door.
“Kaylin—” Severn caught her wrist. “Look at the ward.”
She did. “It’s the doorward.”
“Not to my eyes. Lord Tiamaris?”
Tiamaris frowned. “Private,” he told Kaylin softly. “Let me open the door.” It wasn’t a request. On any other day Kaylin would have agreed with alacrity.
“You think you can safely touch this ward?”
“Ah. No, you misunderstand me.” He lifted his arm, drew it back, and drove it into the planks. It took him five attempts to break through the wood, the door was that solid. As he was pulling what remained off the hinges, Kaylin said, “Well, that works. I don’t suppose I could get you to try that when we get back home?”
He offered her the glimmer of a smile. “You could,” he said, with some satisfaction. “It’s not as if I depend on the salary.”
When the door frame was clear, except for stubborn, sharp splinters, Tiamaris shone a light into the room. It was, more or less, the room Kaylin remembered, at least at first glance.
The dome was there, its stone petals closed to the sky; windows let in the endless sun. The long, oval mirror that the Hawklord used to access records stood where it always stood, and as Kaylin entered the room, she caught a glimpse of her reflection, and froze.
The room in the reflection wasn’t the room she was standing in.
For one, it was darker; the light was less natural. Flickers of firelight made long and trembling shadows by glancing off standing structures—the mirror, the chair, the recessed desk, the shelves against the curve of the rounded walls. The room was empty.
She knew this because it had been empty when she had first seen it, and it had been night. She hadn’t dared to make the climb during the day; the Aerians patrolled the sky, and if they were careless because they expected no trouble, they weren’t exactly blind. She had watched them for days. She had watched the building for days, as well. She had even gone into it—albeit from the public entrances that led to Missing Persons.
The Halls were crowded enough that she could leave Missing Persons without much difficulty, but bypassing the guards standing in front of any other set of closed doors became instantly too difficult; she didn’t want them to take note of her. She had tied her hair in pigtails and divested herself of any obvious weapons, in order to appear younger. This was rewarded by “Are you lost?” or, worse, “Are you lost, dear?” rather than snarling or suspicion.
But if she were honest—and she clearly had trouble with that, which was ironic given how bad she was at lying—she could admit that she’d wanted the climb. She’d spent weeks practicing. She could scale the outside of the tallest building in the City, and she could make it. They’d wonder how she’d gotten in.
Getting down was always harder, but she’d worry about that later. Always later.
She could see that in the face of her reflection—her reflection, seven years younger, and hungrier in ways that she couldn’t clearly remember. Oh, she remembered the fact of it—but it had no teeth, now; it didn’t make her bl
eed.
She studied her younger self. Her eye was bruised; she’d forgotten that; her cheek was rubbed raw, probably by sliding down stone. Her hands were at her sides. But her own hands were empty; her reflection’s bore daggers; when she lifted a hand, her younger hand rose, as well, blades glinting briefly. The blades were flat and small. You’ve come here, she thought, to kill the Hawklord. But the Hawklord was not yet in the Tower. Her reflection turned to the door, and then shrugged and moved out of Kaylin’s field of view, to find a place to hide.
She hadn’t come here to challenge him, after all; she’d come here to kill him. How she achieved it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about bravery or honor, just death. Death and her own survival.
She let her hands fall, and turned to Tiamaris. Tiamaris stood to one side of the mirror, his back toward its reflective surface. He was staring at the Hawklord’s chair. As he did, Kaylin thought the chair shifted in place, the lines of it becoming taller, wider and more severely grandiose. What had been wood—albeit it finely oiled and expensive—glittered with something brighter and shinier. Gold? Gold leaf, at least.
This is not the past, she reminded herself. Because in the past, the Hawklord didn’t occupy a throne. No one occupied this one, now. It sat like an invitation or a promise.
“Understood,” Nightshade said quietly. He glanced at Lord Tiamaris.
“The Tower is not subtle,” Tiamaris agreed, although he was tense. “But it is newly invoked, newly infused with whatever power we saw; subtlety, where it exists, will come.”
Lord Nightshade’s gaze trailed over Kaylin’s face. “I am curious,” he finally said. “What does the Tower offer to tempt you?”
“I’m mortal,” she said with a grimace. “Powerful things don’t bother to tempt us when they can squash us flat without effort. This is a perfect example. Tiamaris—Lord Tiamaris,” she added quickly, “gets a throne. I get a reflection of my younger self that’s a lot more real than I wanted to see.”
He surprised her. He laughed.
“You,” she said, with slight heat, “get amusement at our expense. So far, only the Corporal is out in the cold.”
“And he’s more than content to remain so,” Severn added.
Lord Nightshade lifted a hand and touched her cheek, covering his mark with the tips of cool fingers. “You do not fear me.” There was a trace of surprise in his voice.
He meant the touch to be discomfiting, and it was. She stood her ground in spite of that. “I did, once,” she told him, since she was in the Tower and the Tower seemed to demand as much honesty as she could offer. “I was terrified of the shadow of your Castle.”
“My…Castle?”
Dammit.
Severn shrugged; Tiamaris looked momentarily impassive.
“Castle Nightshade,” she said. “In the fief of Nightshade, where you rule.”
“And you lived in this fief of…Nightshade?”
“For almost all of my life until—until—” This, she would not share, not yet. Maybe not ever, although her Lord Nightshade knew. “Until I had to leave. When I left, I came here, to the fief we call Barren in my time. This Tower is Barren’s Tower.”
“And the fief?”
“The fiefs are what’s left of the interior of the City. Or the ring around the interior. They’re divided into six parts; the parts aren’t even, and I’ve no idea how the division was decided.”
“The Towers decide,” Tiamaris said. “Private, you speak too much.”
“I know. I do.” She turned to look at the mirror again. “I’m not sure why you get offered a throne and I get offered the truth.”
“We are offered,” Tiamaris told her, “some part of what we know, and of what we hide.”
“You hide thrones?”
He smacked the back of her head, but lightly enough that he might have been human. “Come away from the mirror,” he told her. “Come look at the throne instead.”
It was a welcome invitation. “Is there something wrong with it, other than the fact that it’s a throne?”
He didn’t answer, and it was the wrong kind of silence. She walked across the room, cutting in front of Tiamaris, until she stood three feet away from the throne itself. “I wouldn’t sit in it,” she said, and as she did, something beneath the surface of the bright and shining throne moved, curling slowly in on itself, like a snake pressed beneath glass, but not quite crushed.
“No,” he replied. “But it was not meant for you.” He came to stand by her side. He did not, however, approach the throne. “What will happen here, Kaylin?”
“You’re asking me that as if you expect me to have an answer. If the throne is for you, and the mirror for me, you have just as much chance as I do of predicting what comes next.”
The Dragon’s smile was thin and strange, because none of the rest of his face seemed to move. “The Tower is attempting to have two conversations at once, with predictable difficulties. But I believe that it is not yet aware that it is speaking to two distinct entities.”
“I’m not going to like how you know this, am I?”
“Probably not. You appear to still be sane.” He lifted an arm, and drew her gaze up to the closed aperture of the Hawklord’s Tower. She watched, squinting, as it began to open. It let in, not sunlight, as she would have expected from the light that poured in through the windows, but night—a night broken by stars, and the hint of silver that was moonlight. One moon; the other lay hidden by the curved petals of roof itself.
But she lost that, and the night sky, as she saw what descended through the opening. The first thing she saw were wings. She had never seen black wings on an Aerian before, and decided then that she’d been happier for the lack. Flight feathers almost gleamed in the light Tiamaris’s spell still shed, as if they were edged, and waiting to cut.
It was only the wings that were black; the figure that descended was robed in gray, and its hands were almost alabaster, they were so pale. One ring gleamed on the slender fingers of the right hand; it was green and gold, and large.
She recognized it instantly.
She’d worn it that morning to the High Halls. She stopped breathing as the figure descended; it landed directly in front of the throne itself. The robes were hooded, and as the figure touched down, it lifted graceful—impossibly graceful—hands to push the hood aside.
It needn’t have bothered; Kaylin knew whose face she would see.
CHAPTER 23
It was, of course, her own face. Her face, but paler, and completely unscarred and unbruised. Something as common as a pimple had never touched that skin.
Tiamaris caught Kaylin’s wrist as she moved. Since she’d had no intention of moving, it came as a surprise, and she pulled at her wrist, which was about as useful as pulling at rock and hoping the bits stuck between your fingers would come off in your hands. “Wait,” he said.
She nodded, but he didn’t release her wrist.
In the sudden night of the Tower, the figure nodded almost regally, and then, folding her wings, took her place upon the throne. Kaylin snorted, and the figure’s almost impassive reflection of Kaylin’s living face turned toward her.
“Aerians,” Kaylin said, “don’t sit in high-backed chairs. They can’t.”
“It is,” the not-Aerian replied, “a special chair.” Which was creepy; it spoke with Kaylin’s voice, but without any of Kaylin’s usual inflections; it sounded too damn smooth, too chilly. “Why are you here, Elianne?”
Tiamaris’s fingers tightened. They would, Kaylin was certain, leave bruises. Bruises were better than this. She started to say, I’m not Elianne, but she couldn’t. “I’m fine, Tiamaris,” she told the Dragon Lord. When he didn’t respond, she added, “Can I have my arm back?”
“I’ll break it,” he whispered, “if you do not act with caution.”
She nodded, and he let go. Rubbing her wrist, she thought, yes, definitely, bruises. But she looked at the figure on the throne as she did, aware that she had still not answered the
question. Looking around a room that was, except for the throne and the wrong version of her, familiar, she said, “I’m here because you called me.”
A slight frown creased the pale, perfect mirror of Kaylin’s face. “I think you misunderstand the question. Perhaps I did not ask it correctly the first time.”
“No, I understood it the first—”
“Why are you here?”
This time, she spoke with the voice of Lord Grammayre, the Hawklord, and his voice shook the Tower.
Why are you here?
She had watched him from the top of the aperture. She had timed things perfectly, but if she hadn’t, she would never have come this far. All she had to do now was wait, drop, and kill. He wasn’t—according to Barren—a mage; he was just an Aerian.
Just an Aerian. Barren had made it seem as if Aerians were something less than men—but Barren had made her feel as if she were less than one, as well. In the dark of this almost-night, she could hear Barren’s voice, Barren’s words; she could feel hands that would leave bruises and the subtle scars that she would only understand years later.
Fief truth: survival was all. Well, she’d survived. She’d killed, continued to kill, for Barren. She didn’t question him, anymore. When he’d assigned her this kill, she’d crossed the bridge, scuttling across the Ablayne like a terrified spider. Only Morse had questioned her decision. Only Morse had fought it. But she’d fought with Elianne, not Barren, and Elianne was therefore here.
Some part of Elianne had expected every single person she met here to be happy, cheerful, grateful for the lives they had never had to lead. That part was to be disappointed; she could live with that. But she had also expected the people here to see, clearly, what and who she was, what she’d done on the other side of the river—as if she bore obvious marks across her brow.
They didn’t, of course. They barely even saw her, they were so wrapped up in their own lives. She had passed between them in the open streets, except when she failed to notice them in time—the streets here were more crowded than she was used to on an instinctive level. Some had apologized, some had cursed her—it was really no different.
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