“We are hungry,” he added. “We are tired. We are…fractious. When we made the decision to leave our homes, we came to it late, and many were lost to the Shadows.”
Kaylin stiffened. “Shadows?”
The way she said the word made him flinch, and he glanced, once, at Mejrah. Or perhaps beyond her to where her people huddled in the open streets. “You know of what I speak.”
“I…yes.”
“But you have these lands, and these buildings, and those men—and to my eye, they are men.”
“And women,” she said quickly.
He looked confused. “Some of your men are female, yes.”
Clearly the translation between traveler and Chosen wasn’t entirely perfect.
“They are people,” he said, probably because her confusion was clear. “They are of a people. The Shadows transform us. They break all ties and all kinship. Sometimes it is subtle, and therein lies the greatest danger. We cannot easily see it until the damage has been done. But often it is…not subtle. Those three,” he said again.
“They’re Dragons,” Kaylin replied.
His eyes widened, and she wondered what the word Dragon meant to these men and women.
“This City is part of the Empire.”
He nodded; they had that word, or a similar one.
“It’s ruled by a Dragon. One very like the three who now stand in the streets. I’m a—a guard. I protect people and enforce the Emperor’s laws. The men behind the Dragon also serve as guards, in a different unit. They do the same. If you intend to stay here, or to stay anywhere in the Empire, you will be the subjects of the Dragon Emperor, and you’ll follow his laws.
“They’re not difficult. They’re not bad. They’re worth the time and the effort it takes to more or less uphold them. It’s what I do, what I’ve chosen to do.” She paused, and then said, “If the armed men behind the Dragons attempted to kill them, I’m pretty sure it’d be considered treason, and regardless, they’d all die. Probably quickly. Dragons are stronger than humans. They breathe fire, and they don’t need more weapons than their claws and their jaws. If they want, they can take to the skies and just rain fire on anything that moves beneath them.
“But those men wouldn’t try because the Dragons standing in the same street that your people are now standing in haven’t broken any laws.”
“They are…Dragons.”
“Yes.”
“Let me return to Mejrah, and consult with her. Will you join me?”
“If it’s allowable. I and my companion.”
When Effaron had withdrawn his hand, his words returned to babble. Kaylin wasn’t certain why; she hadn’t had to touch him in the nonworld. Ybelline said, “You could understand him, and he you.”
Kaylin nodded, lifting an arm with its patched, burned remnant of sleeve. “These apparently help. Who knew?”
“I understood much of what he said, thanks to Everly’s odd vision. They fled Shadows. They are afraid that they’ve fled to yet another battlefield. But…he said one word which was significant which Everly didn’t foresee.”
“Dragon?”
“Is that what it was?”
“I think so. I also think any shape-shifting and anything that looks different is going to cause panic.” Where panic, in this case, meant a lot of big weapons cutting into a lot of small people.
As they approached Mejrah, who stood in the center of the line, Kaylin could finally see some hint of the rest of the refugees. They were huddled into a much smaller space than people that size should even be able to fit, and they were—except for the children—silent. Grim-faced.
There were a lot of them. She felt what little heart she had sinking as she tried to count and gave up. There were far too many to just find emergency housing for, and far too many to casually feed, never mind employ.
Mejrah pointed at the drums, and Kaylin looked at them, as silently instructed. She turned to Effaron to ask him what the drums signified, but before she could, Ybelline spoke. She spoke in that low but musical voice that Kaylin loved, and the old woman’s brows rose into her straggly hair. Her expression cracked on a smile that was heavy with relief, and not a little joy, and she started to talk rapidly.
Ybelline’s laugh was chagrined; she held up both of her hands, and spoke again—but she spoke slowly and carefully. Mejrah slowed down, as well, gesturing toward the drums, and then the Dragons, as she spoke.
“There’s some minor difficulty,” Ybelline finally said—in Elantran. “My speech is not good enough, but I think she is asking permission to use the drums to perform a ceremony of some sort. It’s either cleansing—”
“Which would be bad, probably.”
“Or divination.”
“Which we could probably talk the Dragons into tolerating.”
“She’s willing to tell the men to stand down if we’ll allow this.”
“And if we don’t?”
“I didn’t ask.” Ybelline hesitated, and then said, “Cultural differences influence the way people speak and interact. I think it was meant as a request.”
“Tell her we’re going to go ask the Dragons.”
Ybelline nodded and did as Kaylin asked, and they retreated, notably unharmed, toward Tiamaris, Emmerian, and Diarmat.
Tiamaris was an orange shade of bronze; she had seen him red once, and a paler bronze once. Emmerian was a deep, deep blue; Diarmat was a blue-green. She wondered why the colors could differ, but didn’t ask. Instead, she said: “The good news is that Ybelline can speak some of their language.”
If Dragons had had real eyebrows, Tiamaris would have raised one. “The bad news?”
“I’m not sure it’s all bad—but…” She hesitated. “I think they fled their world when it had all but been consumed by Shadows. It wasn’t the Devourer they were fleeing.”
“You think.”
She nodded, ignoring the gibe in the words. “They’re worried that the three of you are, in fact, possessed by Shadows. It’s the shape-shifting. I don’t think they had Dragons back home.”
Emmerian snorted, and a tuft of smoke blew past Kaylin’s hair.
“The drums,” she said, “are part of some ceremony that’s meant to ascertain whether or not you’re…infested? Contaminated?”
Tiamaris turned to his companions, which by this point included the human forms of Sanabalis and the Arkon.
The Arkon was gazing across the gap between Tiamaris and the strangers. “Shadows?” he finally said.
Kaylin nodded. “It makes sense, at least to me.”
“How so?”
“Ravellon,” she said quietly. “And your overlapping worlds theory. If the Shadows live at the heart of the fiefs—at the heart of the city—they live in a place where there was, in theory, overlapping spaces between the worlds. It’s not a stretch to assume that they could have traveled.”
The Arkon raised a brow—and he had one, at the moment. But he nodded. “Allow it,” he said.
Lord Sanabalis added, “I concur.”
The strangers were wary of the Dragons, but only tension betrayed fear. They set up the drums, and the two older men that had first appeared near Mejrah now joined her, coming from behind the lines and taking their place at her side.
Kaylin wasn’t certain what to expect; she thought there might be singing or chanting or gesturing of some sort. There wasn’t. There was drumming, but it wasn’t done by any of the three; it was done, in the end, by the warriors, and it was the first time since they’d arrived that they set aside their intimidating weapons. They planted feet almost astride the drums, the whole of their focus on the skins themselves.
When they struck the drums, they struck with enough force it looked as if the stretched skins should break, but their movements weren’t wild; they were concise, economical, and even. The lines of their shoulders stayed steady and straight as their palms picked up the pace. In concert, the drums—six in all—were louder than Dragon’s roar. The din made of hands and skin hit Kayl
in and passed through her, replacing the sound of her heart and the rhythm of her breath.
The whole city must hear this man-made thunder, she thought, but hear was almost the wrong word; it was felt. Only when it was at its loudest did Mejrah speak—and she, too, spoke in concert, but with the two men at her side. They didn’t speak the same words; they didn’t speak in the same rhythm. But together, as if their voices were song, the syllables they made converged until it was clear that they spoke a single, complicated word.
She recognized it as an ancient word because it formed in the air above the drummers. Kaylin watched it rise as if it were a flag on an invisible pole: a statement, a gesture that said: we are here.
She wanted to see the Arkon’s expression but she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the rising glyph; it crested buildings until it was higher—by far—than even the peaks of the towers of the Halls of Law. It seemed to catch sunlight, and azure, and blend them until it was almost too bright to look at.
And from across the city, in a distant place, something saw what she saw. A roar of fury crested the sound of drums.
The roar broke the spell that held her gaze fixed to the skies, and she shook herself, her hands dropping instinctively to daggers which weren’t, at the moment, useful. The drummers didn’t stop, but they turned, in unison, to look toward that furious roar, and as they did, Kaylin knew where it had come from: the fiefs. The heart of the fiefs.
Mejrah bowed her head; she had fallen silent at the end of the harmony of a single spoken word. The two men to either side looked at her, and then, as the drummers, toward the fiefs.
All of this would have been dramatic enough, but that wasn’t the end of it. Kaylin turned to glance at the Dragon Court, and froze. Sanabalis and the Arkon had both adopted—instantly—their ancient, Draconion forms, and the five Dragons looked toward the fiefs, as well.
Only one of them pushed off from the ground, which, given his wingspan, could have been disastrous in other circumstances. The Dragons spoke briefly, but he shed their words—in their native tongue—the way he shed gravity. He rose. It was, of course, Tiamaris, and he was flying in Imperial skies.
But any caution had been driven from him by the sound—the continuing sound—of the distant roar. He lifted his neck as he flew, and he trumpeted his own response; Kaylin was surprised it didn’t shatter the damn windows in Elani, it was so loud. And it was defiant; it encompassed words that she didn’t even need to understand, his tone was so strong.
After a few seconds’ hesitation, the other Dragons joined him, shedding gravity and gaining the thermals of height above the city streets. Her jaw dropped as sun glinted off their scales and their wings unfolded completely; they were, for an instant, as dangerous and incomprehensible as gods.
And as beautiful, to Kaylin, as the ideal of flight, the dream of it. They roared as the drums continued to beat, and they circled the word that hovered in the air as if they were part of it.
She startled as she felt a hand on her shoulder; it was Severn. She looked at him, blinking; he was short and mortal and so ordinary he seemed, for a minute, part of a different world. And he was, but it was also her world. She shook her head as if to clear it.
“Look,” he said, although she caught the word by the movement of his lips, because it was spoken softly enough it had no hope of carrying.
She turned toward the strangers. Beyond the drummers, the line that had prevented anyone from easily reaching the refugees had loosened, and some of the newcomers, with much smaller—but just as visible—weapons now moved in the open street. They moved without caution and without awareness, and some of their jaws had dropped enough that their mouths were silent O’s. Some lifted children to shoulders; some cradled them in their arms; some supported elderly. They all looked up in wonder and awe at the sight of the Dragons.
Mejrah’s head snapped up, but she didn’t shout at them, didn’t warn them away, and even at this distance, Kaylin could see that the woman’s eyes were filmed with tears. She’d’ve bet a month’s pay against them falling, and she’d’ve won, too, but she suspected that Severn wasn’t stupid enough to take that bet.
But Mejrah wasn’t silent, and her expression didn’t make clear whether they were almost tears of relief or grief. Instead, she spoke. Her voice was pitched to carry—it had to be; she had to overcome the beat of those drums and the roar of flying Dragons. No doubt the rest of the City was now also aware that Dragons circled above, and no doubt it was already causing panic; the Swords would have their work cut out today.
But now? They bore witness, as mute as Kaylin.
Mejrah’s words demanded a response, and she received it instantly. Every armed man or woman who was not pounding the drums lifted their weapons almost above their heads, and they shouted their reply. Individually, their voices were no match for Dragons or even drums—but together, their reply was just as deafening, just as determined. Hungry, tired, and homeless, they had found strength enough to respond to whatever it was she asked them.
Mejrah nodded. She lifted one stiff palm, held it above her head for a minute, and then dropped it as if it were a blade. The drums stopped. The drummers, slick with sweat and effort, drew back, reaching almost blindly for the weapons they’d set aside. Weapons first, Kaylin thought. Everything else after. Then again, her hands were still on her daggers; she just wanted for more impressive weapons.
Mejrah then walked toward Kaylin. Toward Ybelline, who stood in silence, waiting. The old woman didn’t keep her distance, and this seemed a signal of sorts. She spoke, slowly, to Ybelline. Ybelline had a way of being both grave and welcoming which she used here. She listened.
“She says that they will abide by the rules of these lands. They are not at home here, but they are ready—and willing—to earn their place. She says that the Dragons are not, as they feared, creatures of Shadow. They are so old they have never been seen or heard by any of her people—but that a greater Shadow exists and it has been exposed.
“They know of these things. They have seen them. They will fight beside any who fight their ancient enemy. They will, if they are allowed, prove their worthiness. They will not surrender another…home, I think.”
Kaylin nodded. “But you’re going to have to repeat it,” she added, “when they finally land.”
They finally landed, in Kaylin’s words, less than an hour later. She watched as the Swords and the strangers cleared the streets; it was still a tight fit. The Arkon was silver; Sanabalis was full red. The other three hadn’t changed color in flight. But four of the five Dragons retreated into their human form almost the instant their feet touched solid ground, as if the reminder of the lack of flight was more easily born when they had no wings.
The fifth Dragon was Tiamaris; he remained Dragon.
Kaylin hurried to Sanabalis’s side to deliver Mejrah’s message.
“It is not to me that you must deliver that message,” her erst-while teacher said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“We discussed much while in the air. I do not know if you heard the Emperor’s voice. You almost saw him. He was very close to flight.”
“This would have been bad?”
“Yes. While…the Outcaste spoke, yes.” He glanced at the refugees, and then at the sky; the word had faded into the normal azure of its height. “There are many of these strangers, too many to house. We could acquisition fields outside of the City, but those fields are actually productive, and the feeding of the strangers almost necessitates their continued use.
“But Tiamaris,” he added, forgetting the formality of the Court title, “suggested a solution.”
She waited.
“You are aware that his fief was devastated in the breach between the heart of the fiefs and what was formerly Barren?”
She nodded. She’d seen it up close.
“They lost buildings, and they lost many people. To my surprise, it is the latter that he considered the larger problem. He was not particularly impr
essed with the quality of the architecture in the fief itself.”
“He doesn’t—”
“Yes. He intends to absorb the refugees into the fief of Tiamaris, if the Emperor allows it.”
“Will he?”
“This is the only time and place in which it is a possibility. These people are not yet his. They have not yet sworn to abide by his laws and serve his will. He will not cede them if they do. It is therefore urgent that this decision be made now.”
“Because if they’re in Tiamaris—” It still felt strange to use that name as a fief name, but she was learning, “Tiamaris will be their Lord.”
“Yes.”
She thought about this for a few moments, and then said, “How can the Emperor allow that? They look like a small army—”
“Indeed. You have never met the Emperor, and for good reason. But he is not without wisdom, and not without mercy—in his fashion. Mercy is always more readily dispensed at a distance, when one is not being personally offended or defied,” he added. “But there are some things it is not possible for the Emperor to do, no matter how rational it might look to the merely mortal at the time.
“It is why, in the end, he is not here. He has accepted that the refugees pose no threat to his hoard—for the moment. Regardless, he will not be able to stand aside for Tiamaris, or to allow Tiamaris to make his claim, if he is present.
“You may, however, join Tiamaris. Ybelline Rabon’alani is needed there.”
Tiamaris faced Mejrah as if she were the only person present. Given that she was surrounded by men and women who bristled with edged weapons, this was impressive. Nor did she flinch or step back as he approached, his wings once again folded over his back.
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