Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  Iberrienne’s signature adorned the wreckage of her home, but it wasn’t the only one. Kaylin hesitated as she watched the two men work. If a criminal were both careful and well connected, Arcane bombs with disparate signatures could be used; the signature itself wasn’t enough to wholly implicate the caster as a criminal. Why, she didn’t know—what other uses were there for Arcane bombs?

  Kaylin. It was Nightshade’s disembodied voice. What has happened?

  We ran into the forest version of Ferals. They’re dead. We have two injured. We’ve lost two horses; the Ferals appear to have broken into two groups and attacked the caravan from either end.

  She felt Nightshade’s genuine regret at the loss of the horses. The injuries sustained by the Barrani Lords did not trouble him at all. Are you in the Hallionne? Hallionne Bertolle?

  We are, he replied. There has been minor difficulty. If the Consort now assumes there’s been a breach, tell her that she is correct; it is subtle. I have been able to lend power to the Hallionne, but it is not within my power to waken it.

  Kariastos said—

  Yes. Kariastos implied that he would see the Hallionne wakened. I have reason to believe that this was true, but Bertolle is not…completely present.

  Kaylin would have asked for more information, but she was interrupted.

  “What killed this creature?” Evarrim demanded. Loudly.

  Kaylin turned in the direction of his voice. The small dragon was once again perched on her shoulder, staring out at the world. She considered silence as an option.

  The Consort, however, said, “I believe he swallowed the familiar’s breath.”

  Evarrim’s brows rose toward his tiara. He swiveled in Kaylin’s direction. Iberrienne, however, did not. “You had your familiar attack the creature?”

  “Not precisely.”

  “What, precisely, did you do?”

  “Nothing.” She’d stumbled over a fallen tree, but felt no pressing need to share that with a member of the Arcanum. “He attacked the Feral.”

  “It is not, by any definition, something as harmless as a Feral.”

  It was true. Among other things, dead Ferals stayed dead; they didn’t dissolve the ground around them, turning it, in the process, to chaos.

  Evarrim drew sword for the first time that day. The Consort stepped in front of him. She moved quickly. “Lord Evarrim.” Her voice was cool. Kaylin couldn’t see the color of her eyes; the tone implied endless blue.

  “I wish to see the effects of the familiar’s breath on the creature,” Evarrim told her evenly.

  “And you require a sword for that?” Kaylin muttered under her breath. She was solidly ignored.

  “Now is not the time or place. Such a study could take days, and we are already two hours behind schedule.”

  “It would not take days—”

  “It would take days,” she repeated, “if done with any consideration for safety.”

  He wanted to argue. His eyes were perfectly visible to Kaylin. But after a long, long silence, he sheathed his sword. “Lady.”

  “Lord Evarrim.” She turned to Kaylin. “Come. The horses that survived have been gathered; the way will be slower and the carriages may be more crowded, but it is now imperative that we spend as little time on the road as possible.”

  * * *

  The Consort said very little until the carriage had been on the move for at least half an hour.

  Teela and Severn had joined Kaylin and the Consort; Kaylin privately thought the Consort had chosen them because it was the Hawks or two of the other Lords. The Lords would not, of course, complain about her choices, but they weren’t happy with them.

  “Nightshade said he needs your help.”

  The Consort actually grimaced; she was tired. “With what, exactly? The whole of the High Court, excepting only Andellen, is in the caravan; no one is likely to attempt to end his life for hours yet.”

  “Hallionne Bertolle isn’t fully awake. Nightshade suspects there’s been a breach in the Hallionne’s defense.”

  Teela stiffened but kept silent; the Consort closed her eyes. When she opened them, she stared out of the window, hands folded—and tensed—in her lap. “That would explain much. It is unusual to be attacked on the road itself.”

  “I don’t understand where they came from. I mean, they’re Shadows.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they’re here, and we’re pretty far outside the City.”

  “They did not come from the heart of the fiefs,” she replied. “If you think that all Shadow exists in the heart of the fiefs, you fail to understand the nature of the ancient wars. There are other places, older and wilder; they are not contained the way the heart of the fiefs is now contained, although they are considered far less dangerous. The Hallionne are part of the defense against their encroachment.”

  Kaylin frowned. “Why were the Shadows here?”

  “That is the question that now concerns us. Two of our number are tracking the beasts; they are not particularly careful when they hunt.”

  Kaylin hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “Is it safe to send out just the two?”

  “They have had experience tracking creatures such as these.”

  When Kaylin failed to reply, the Consort sighed. “No, of course it isn’t safe. But it is information that the Hallionne may not be able to gather; the Shadows don’t roam the lands within which the Hallionne are situated unless something is gravely wrong with the Hallionne. Did Lord Nightshade offer any other word?”

  Kaylin shook her head.

  “I think,” Teela said softly, “they intend to gather at the edge of the Hallionne’s domain.”

  “Yes,” the Consort replied.

  * * *

  It was Teela who called a halt to the caravan, although it was the Lady who conveyed the orders. This time, the horses were gathered immediately; bows were strung in silence. Both Iberrienne and Evarrim traveled the two sides of forest that enclosed the road. Accustomed to the subtle bickering that well-mannered men and women of power employed, Kaylin found the swift and silent way they worked together unsettling. Very few words were exchanged; curt orders were given. Magic was deployed along the outer edges of the caravan. It was subtle and, for magic, painless, although she was instantly aware of its presence.

  The small dragon’s grip tightened as Kaylin stood her ground. Severn had his weapons out; he was silent as Barrani and as watchful.

  “Teela.”

  Teela glanced at Kaylin.

  “I think they’re coming.”

  “They are. You can hear them?”

  “No.” She tilted her head at the small dragon, indicating the source of the suspicion.

  Teela regarded the small dragon for a long moment; breeze moved her hair. In the dimmer lights of the encampment, her eyes were almost black.

  “Are there more of them than last time?”

  The Barrani Hawk nodded. “I should never have agreed to this exchange of information.”

  “You didn’t. The Hawklord did. Worry about yourself.”

  Teela nodded, but she looked at the small dragon. “Keep her alive, if you can.”

  The dragon snorted. He was as tense as Teela looked. When he launched himself off her shoulders, Kaylin drew her daggers.

  * * *

  The Barrani reacted first. Arrows flew. Kaylin heard soft thunking sounds as they hit their targets; they were followed by grunts of pain. This time, the creatures hadn’t bothered with the heavy growling or the casual destruction of trees. They hadn’t charged in; they had padded forward as silently as something the size of a horse could.

  That changed when the archers made clear they’d been spotted. Kaylin, standing behind the more heavily armed Barrani, froze when she saw the creatures leap into the front line; in the moonlight, they were coal-gray. She couldn’t see their eyes, but she could hear their voices; they once again spoke in Elantran—apparently to issue orders.

  Living as an orp
han in the streets of Nightshade had caused her to develop a visceral fear of Ferals. If caught in the streets by Ferals, it was death; if the Ferals hadn’t managed to pick up a scent, silence and stillness could sometimes preserve life. She felt like that child now.

  Ferals in the fiefs no longer terrified her. These creatures did. She wondered how much better—or worse—it would have been had Ferals been intelligent enough to speak. And she wondered why, in speaking, they’d chosen Elantran; it was the human mother tongue in the Empire. Orders from the Barrani Lords traveled up and down the line; twice, lightning flashed in the trees nearest the carriages.

  Those trees then disgorged angry Shadows.

  Evarrim, much as she loathed him, was there in an instant. Iberrienne held the other side of the road. Whatever else he’d planned, whatever he’d done, he was risking his life on the front lines. Two men not graced with the tiara of the Arcanum joined them, although they didn’t sheathe their swords. The small dragon stopped its circling flight above her head; he darted toward the nearest pack of Shadows. And they were a pack, to Kaylin’s eye; they worked in concert.

  Severn joined the group nearest Kaylin, standing to one side.

  Kaylin looked at her daggers and swore that she’d master a sword if it killed her. Then she just swore. It helped. It burned through some of the terror that kept her nearly immobile. She caught sight of the small dragon as he flew above the three beasts who had formed a front line with which to attack the Barrani; three were all they could fit, given the placement of trees they hadn’t bothered to overturn in their rush.

  Teela was in the front rank. The Consort was not; she stood behind, her arms by her side. When the borders of Tiamaris had been heavily contested, the army of Shadows had stayed on the right side of the boundary. Here, nothing kept them in check.

  Some of them died. They died in number, but the Barrani Lords were injured; the miracle was that they weren’t corpses. Sheathing daggers, and knowing just how little Barrani liked healing, she ran, keeping low to ground, to reach the first man’s side. Someone had already stepped into the space he’d vacated. She dragged the Barrani Lord out of the immediate range of jaws or friendly swords; he was so heavy that she stopped well before she’d reached a carriage.

  Placing her hands against his cheeks, she concentrated. The marks on her arms—the few that were visible in the long sleeves of the dress she’d been gifted by the Hallionne—began to glow. In the moonlight, they were warm and golden. The Barrani Lord was conscious, but in a way that suggested this was a bad thing; his eyes were open, unblinking, his stare glassy.

  He grimaced, focusing on her face; it clearly wasn’t a face he wanted to see, and he caught her hands—or rather, her wrists—in both of his to pull them away.

  She said, “The Shadow will kill you. I’ll let you die if you fight me; even mostly dead, you’d probably win. Your choice.”

  He was going to choose death; she knew it. But Evarrim’s voice, sharp and cold, drifted into that resolve. “The Consort is on the field. How many can we afford to lose before she has no defense at all?”

  The words were enough, but only barely; the Barrani Lord’s hands trembled as he released hers.

  At her back, the creatures were snarling and barking orders; in front of her, a dying Barrani Lord was struggling not to curse her existence. She would get no thanks for this night’s work, but at the moment, it didn’t matter. Something was wrong with his wounds.

  Kaylin pulled her hands back, fumbling with the studs on the bracer that contained her unpredictable magic. It snapped open and she tossed it over her shoulder; she couldn’t work with it on. She hoped whatever magic caused it to return to its keeper—generally Severn—worked outside of Elantra, because there was no way she was going to find it again tonight.

  Remembering the sudden dissolution of a newly felled tree and the physical chaos that had once been road, she could guess. Healing wasn’t magic in the Sanabalis sense of the word. It was less about forcing a body to conform to her will by dumping power into it until it was too stupefied to disobey, and more about channeling power into the places it needed to be for the body to naturally heal itself. It was about holding enough of the body together so that the person didn’t die while the healing began—and continued.

  Bodies had a natural shape, a natural form. Shadow, in Kaylin’s experience, did not—it changed shape and form on the fly. She knew Shadow by touch, although for obvious reasons she had had as little physical contact with it as she possibly could; touching Shadow in general was a good way to shorten life span precipitously. This felt different. More solid, somehow; less amorphous and pervasive.

  No, she thought, as she explored the damage done. It felt almost alive, distinct. It was growing and rearranging parts of Barrani blood and body as it spread. And it was doing so by changing the natural order of the physical form.

  She pushed it back, which was hard. The Barrani Lord grunted in pain, his whole body stiffening as she worked. Whatever it was she was doing to save his life wasn’t gentle and couldn’t be painless. The saliva of the beast had worked its way into flesh, and the flesh needed to be uprooted to remove it.

  She did the uprooting. She made no apology. She couldn’t—it would have taken too much time to draw breath and offer the words. The rest of the Barrani body knew its own healthy shape, its own natural form; she was going to have to trust it to channel and guide the healing.

  She tried very hard not to hear Barrani thoughts. He tried harder not to share them, but some spillover was impossible to avoid. Everything about him was a unified whole: the sound of his heart, the motion of his lungs as they struggled to inhale and exhale, the way his ribs snapped as she uprooted the last of the foreign substance, the sound of his anger at his injuries, his self-loathing at the idea that survival might depend on a mortal—an upstart Lord of the High Court, and the Consort’s personal pet.

  It didn’t even feel harsh to her as she guided his body into the right shape; it felt natural. He had endured his father’s brief anger as he declared his intent to take the test of name and join the High Court—or be lost to the race forever. He had endured his sister’s pleas, and worse, her abiding envy and resentment when he had failed to fail. He had endured the derision of Lords who had been members of the Court for so long they had seen the rise and fall of not one High Lord but three. Everything about him spoke of his ability to endure.

  He would endure this, and if the mortal dared to breathe a word about him thereafter, he would see her dead; he would not allow her the handful of years remaining in her insignificant, animal life span.

  When he was at the outer edge of an endurance that meant survival, he grabbed both her wrists and yanked them away from his face, and she cried out at the shock of the loss of contact. He was still bleeding; he was still injured. But he could judge the state of his health for himself—in a way that most humans injured that badly could not—and he would not accept her pity for one second longer than absolutely necessary.

  He knew what she’d seen and felt, but regardless, he composed his expression instantly. “You have done enough, Lord Kaylin.” His voice was soft; it conveyed none of his fury. She didn’t bother to tell him to sit down when he rose. Sergeant Moran might have been able to do it—she’d had years of verbal combat in the confines of her infirmary—but Kaylin couldn’t bring herself to try. He retrieved his sword, looked to the fighting, and walked away.

  She sat for a moment in all kinds of dark and then shook herself free of the worst of it. There were other injured here. They were going to have to let her do something.

  * * *

  At the end of her third such ordeal, one of the things she considered—briefly—was suicide. The feelings of rage, self-loathing, and resentment felt entirely natural, as if they were part of her thoughts rather than Barrani spillover, and she had no easy way to shunt them aside. Severn found her; he was bleeding, and she leaned into his chest anyway.

  “Kaylin—”
/>   She shook her head. “Let me do this,” she whispered. “I can’t—”

  “I’m hardly injured.”

  “I know, but you’re you. The Barrani healing—I—”

  “You’re shaking.”

  She nodded.

  “You’ll exhaust yourself.”

  “They won’t heal if they can’t get rid of—of whatever it is in their wounds.” She touched Severn’s cheek. He hadn’t lied; the wound—across his left forearm—wasn’t bad. More important, it was clean. Not all of the injured Barrani had been contaminated, either; those that hadn’t she didn’t approach. It wasn’t hard; they went out of their way to avoid her as word of her healing spread.

  But right now, she healed Severn’s wound instead. She felt his concern like a balm, although it was followed by unwelcome guilt; he feared to tax the power she had because neither of them really understood it. No one did. But he saw some part of what the Barrani had felt, and struggled with his sudden surge of anger—he knew anger wasn’t helpful. As a child, Kaylin had hated it. Now? It felt normal. It felt clean. She wanted to cling to it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to his chest, because she was still leaning against him.

  “You could have let them die.”

  “I’m not sure they would. Die, I mean.”

  He pulled back, but only far enough to see her face. He didn’t ask her what she meant; he seemed to be able—for the moment—to absorb meaning from her expression. Exhaling, he said, “Would you let them die if they’d stay dead?”

  She laughed. The sound surprised her. “I’d try harder.”

  “And probably fail.” He pulled away. “I’m heading to the back of the caravan; there’s still fighting there.”

  “And the front?”

  “Everything’s dead.”

  She frowned and turned as the hair on the back of her neck suddenly sprang to attention. “No,” she said softly, “it’s not.”