This time, Teela approached the circle with care, but made no attempt to cross it. “The circle isn’t at full power.”
It doesn’t need to be, the strange voice said. Kaylin realized, then, that it wasn’t the girl speaking; her lips didn’t move. Tell her that, since she seems to care for you. It doesn’t need to be.
“The bastard is gloating,” Kaylin translated.
“Tell him I will kill him slowly. Far, far more slowly than anyone his pathetic circle has devoured.” Her eyes were now so dark a blue they were almost all black. Beauty, Kaylin realized, was death. Because Teela had never looked more beautiful than she did at this moment. She spoke, and she spoke clearly in the lilting, lovely words that were High Barrani.
Kaylin would have been terrified into a run that wouldn’t have ended while she could still breathe—if then. The man—if he was that—laughed. At the same time, the girl stirred in Kaylin’s arms. She was a stranger, a stranger’s child, someone who Kaylin didn’t know and might never see again. She was also, for just that moment, the most precious gift that Kaylin had ever been given.
“Teela—if there are others in the other rooms, get them out!”
“Tain is working on it,” Teela replied. “They’re not in danger now. You are.”
Tell her I am not here, was the whispered reply. I have broken none of her coveted Laws. All of the damage and death has been caused by her mortals. It has been a glorious Harvest, and it is not yet finished.
“I think—I think he thinks he knows you.”
The circle of flames grew taller and brighter. Kaylin could still see through them.
Teela said something to Ceridath, and Ceridath shook his head; he looked…broken.
“Try. Try, damn you.”
The man laughed. Do you understand the significance of Harvest, little one? he asked Kaylin. Do you understand the significance of the lunar circle in which you now stand? You have…surprised me. You have taken my Harvest from me; she will not now die without my direct intervention.
“You wanted to kill her.”
Ah, no. I merely wanted the experience of her death. I saw it all so clearly, if briefly; she was anointed.
“Why? Why?”
He laughed. It was his laughter, in the end—his laughter, not Teela’s anger or fear, not the mage’s horrible despair—that pushed Kaylin over an edge she had never realized she’d been walking. Her arms tightened around the girl, as this man—this monster, this worse-than-vulture—continued to speak.
Death is not a given for my people. Life is, and it is endless. There is no variation; there is gain, there is loss, there is the gathering of power, the brief flower of love.
She hated that he could even use the word. Her arms were still glowing, but…they were, like the circle, burning. They were burning hot to his cold, and the cloth that covered the marks began to thin. It didn’t turn to ash, though; it turned to…thought. To memory. It faded, like so many intangibles could fade: hope. Trust. Love. Even love.
But we can experience what we have not been given; it is a gift of the Harvest Moon, for those who are willing to risk it. There is power of a different kind to be found in its ice; power, knowledge. You are born to, and of, flesh; our kind was first carved of stone, the bones of earth. The seasons shift and we are touched by their changes in a way mortals could never be. Let me tell you. Let me tell you while you give me what the circle requires before it releases us both.
The marks on her leg were also burning, and the cloth that hid them thinned, becoming translucent. But the girl in her arms didn’t burn. She began to struggle, but her struggles were as weak as she was. Her eyes were still green—and they were Barrani green, a color Kaylin should have recognized.
“Let her go,” she said, voice low.
He laughed. He laughed again. You’re worried about her when you are here?
“Let. Her. Go.”
The fires began to bend toward her, although the boundary of the circle itself didn’t change; it wouldn’t. It was clearly writ in stone. Stone, she thought, and blood.
Moon gives us the cold fire; it does not burn, but it consumes nonetheless. You can leave the circle—you can try. It may consume you. She, however, cannot. We are bound until the last of her life slips away. You have extended the offering; you cannot end it. The sun is falling; bring your mages, bring your Dragons; it matters not. She bears the marks.
“No,” Kaylin said, withdrawing her hands from the girl’s face. “She doesn’t.” The cuts were gone. Her skin was pale except where it was red-brown with her own blood, but her cheeks were entirely unblemished.
The green of only one of the girl’s eyes began to fade as Kaylin watched in the light of the heightened flames. “Ceridath!” She shouted. “Cast!”
He looked up, looked through the fires that everyone could see, and blinked.
“Cast what?” he shouted, his hands becoming trembling fists.
“Help me see!”
His eyes widened in confusion, but he understood what she was asking; he didn’t understand why. It didn’t matter. She felt the familiar, comfortable pain of his spell begin to take hold, even though her marks were visible and glaring in their brilliance. She looked down at the girl’s eye. At the green eye. She remembered, sickened, that the body in the morgue had been missing one eye. As Ceridath’s spell heightened her own ability to see magic, she saw two signatures: one was familiar.
One was not. The unfamiliar signature was an icy-blue, a sky-blue, and it shone entirely from the iris of the emerald eye.
She’d done many things in her life. None of them had included gouging out the eyes of a child. Her stomach rebelled; her conscious thought overrode it. This wasn’t the child’s eye. Kaylin didn’t even know if she could see anything through it; she was pretty certain someone—someone Barrani—did.
The flames bent in and touched Kaylin; some of the heat went out of the marks on her arms as she raised them. She felt no cold, but the child in her lap screamed as the flames also touched her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the girl. She looked up in helpless fear and saw that Teela and Ceridath were no longer alone; Tain had joined them. Tain, and three other children, only one of whom was now clutched in the arms of a man who loved her more than he loved, in the end, the thing that made him what he was.
The girl didn’t hear her hoarse apology; the other children did hear the girl’s screams.
What are you doing, child?
Sickened, hand shaking, Kaylin took a breath so sharp it almost cut. But her hand was steady as she reached down and plucked out the child’s emerald eye.
It rested in her palm, and the worst thing about it was the fact that it seemed to be turning, as if the gaze, absent the rest of a face, was trying to see. The child stopped screaming the instant the eye was gone, and she looked up at Kaylin, her face whole except for the empty socket, her arms shaking as she stilled. The fire closed over them both, and Kaylin’s marks once again lost heat; the fire, however, touched nothing. It didn’t burn, any more than moonlight could.
She rose. She helped the girl to her feet, gazing at the cut and bloody dress she now wore, at her matted hair, the things that healing could never fix—and didn’t need to. But when she tried to step over the circle, she bounced. “Teela,” she cried.
Teela said nothing, but she came to the circle’s edge.
“Help her,” Kaylin whispered. Her hand became a fist around the eye as she pushed the girl through the circular blanketing flames.
She then walked back to the center of the circle and opened her palm. Brilliant, and a little less green, a little more blue, the eye observed her. She could almost see the ghost of a Barrani face imposed over it, and as she concentrated, it grew stronger. It wasn’t a distinctive face; to Kaylin, unaccustomed to any contact with Barrani that running could avoid, the Barrani all looked too similar.
But this face filled her not with fear, but rage.
“What are you doing?
” he said. This time, his transparent lips moved as he spoke. She could see his other eye now, could see the shift, the total loss of green; his eyes weren’t the blue she was accustomed to seeing in Teela, and she was grateful for that.
“If I could,” she said, voice low, “I would show you mortality. You only live forever if no one kills you. I can’t.” She felt the runes on her arms and legs once again begin to burn, and this time she burned with them. “I don’t care about your Harvest. I don’t care about your moon. I don’t care about your boredom.”
“Is it really me that angers you?” His voice grew softer. “These children would have died anyway. They were prey to mortals, very much like themselves. I did not arrange for their deaths, and I did not offer those deaths for sale. I was aware of them, and I made my accommodations with their jailers. That is all.”
“You didn’t help them. You knew.”
One brow rose. “I do not help cows or the sheep led to slaughter to feed your endless, messy hungers, either. Nor do you eat what is slaughtered although you raise no hand yourself. If you choose to visit the slaughterhouse, what crime do you commit? You watch, you do not affect the fate of the slaughtered one way or the other.”
Her body tightened until it was hard and stiff; until she could feel—she could only feel—two things: the marks on her skin and the anger beneath it that had become everything for just a moment. She opened her mouth, but words failed her entirely; her voice did not. She screamed her rage and her pain and her helplessness, and as she did, she lifted the eye. It widened, and she closed the fist, crushing it.
She heard his scream.
She had never heard a Barrani scream before. It was almost enough.
Oh, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. Because she knew as she stood, screaming and shaking, that every word he had spoken was true. Hate the Barrani, fear them—as anyone who’d lived in the fief of Nightshade learned quickly—it didn’t matter: it was the humans who had started this. It was men and women who had taken these children and offered them gods only knew where for sale. The fires that had surrounded her had guttered; she didn’t even know when.
But absent that cold, cold fire, there was nothing that could quench the flames, the rage. “Kaylin, no!” Teela shouted. Tinny, tiny voice, lost in the maelstrom.
There were two men here, two men who’d had weapons, two men who had been jailers for death. For horrible, painful death. The power was still strong in her and she gestured and they rose, and their eyes widened; she felt their confusion give way to fear. They opened their mouths on screams and blood and the marks burned and she saw red—only red—and some of it was theirs; their blood, their skin. She peeled them open as they screamed.
But their screams weren’t the only screams, and she choked, stepped, stumbled, her hand still clutching something cold and hard, her throat raw.
The children were screaming.
They were screaming in terror. She’d come in time. She’d saved them. And…she was terrifying them now.
No, gods, no. She wanted to tell them that she was doing this for them—or for the children who had died, or the children who wouldn’t have to—but it wasn’t the truth, and she knew it.
Teela caught her arms. Teela, Barrani, beautiful and immortal; Teela, easily bored, blue-eyed and so graceful. It was Teela who shook her; Teela who raised a hand to slap her, and Teela who lowered that hand when she finally met her eyes.
Kaylin turned back to the room with its fading circle of fire, shrugging at least one arm free to do it. There, her knees buckled; there, she began to retch and cough and weep.
She wasn’t sure how long it took the rest of the Hawks to arrive; she wasn’t sure how much time had passed. But the marks on her arms and legs no longer burned; they no longer glowed. They were spent, and perhaps they were as disgusted with Kaylin as she herself was. The children—even the girl whose life she had barely saved—avoided her; they held on to Tain or his shadow. One girl had buried herself in Ceridath’s arms, and Ceridath held her.
But his gaze, when Kaylin rose unsteadily and joined Teela and Tain—staying as far from the children as she could—was full of something suspiciously like pity. Pity was better, far better, than horror.
“Your granddaughter?” she whispered. Her throat hurt; she wasn’t sure she could speak in anything louder.
He nodded. “Meredith,” he said into her hair as she refused to turn to Kaylin. Her hair, which was almost black, and was so ratty, so tangled, so dirty. “I know. But…Kaylin saved you, in the end. If it were not for Kaylin—”
But the child wouldn’t look at Kaylin. And Kaylin, looking at what remained of the men she had killed—horribly, brutally killed—couldn’t blame her.
Marcus was there. Somehow. Marcus, four Barrani Hawks, and—of all people—Clint, his wing ridges high, his eyes a blue that was, as he saw Kaylin, shading to gray. Marcus said something to Teela and Tain—his eyes were orange, and the orange didn’t fade.
But Ceridath understood what was said, even if Kaylin couldn’t. He lifted his chin from its messy, beloved perch, and he spoke in soft, modulated High Barrani.
Teela and Tain exchanged a glance, but said nothing as they looked at Ceridath.
“What did he say?” Kaylin asked sharply, her voice rough and low. “Teela—tell me. Did he—did he tell the Sergeant that he killed those men?”
Ceridath looked at her over his granddaughter’s head. “I have nothing left to lose,” he told Kaylin softly. “Everything that I could possibly hope to preserve is safe, now.”
But she shook her head, in pain. She looked at the blood-soaked Hawk that rested on her chest—well, more on her stomach, really, because the tabard was just too damn large, even cut down—and she wanted to cry. She lifted her chin instead, exposing her throat, and exposing everything else as well. “I killed them,” she told Sergeant Kassan. “He didn’t.”
“Kaylin,” Ceridath shook his head. “Let me—”
Marcus flexed claws; he had no further glance to spare the mage. “How?”
Clint’s eyes had now stopped their shift to gray.
“I don’t know,” was her quiet reply. “I don’t know how. Does it matter? They’d been disarmed. They couldn’t do anything else.” She lowered her chin because she lowered her head. “I was just so angry. I couldn’t reach the other. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted them to die. I wanted them to understand what it felt like to be a helpless victim.” She raised her head again, trying not to cry. “Are you going to arrest me now?”
His eyes were an odd shade of gold. When they’d become gold, she didn’t know; she hadn’t been looking at him.
“Kitling,” he said. “Come here.”
She didn’t. Instead, she began to remove the tabard. She stopped when he growled.
“Did I or did I not give you an order?”
“You did,” Teela said. “I heard it.”
“Half the block heard it,” Tain muttered.
Kaylin stared at him in confusion.
“Did I?” He barked.
“Yes?”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Then why are you still standing there?”
She looked back at Teela, Tain, and the children who huddled directly behind them. Teela nudged her forward.
She walked like a condemned person to where the Leontine Sergeant stood, and lifted her chin again. But he caught it, and she discovered that the pads of his paws were very, very soft—or at least they could be. He didn’t speak; he met her eyes and held her gaze for what seemed like minutes. And then he cuffed the side of her head gently.
“Go with Clint,” he told her. “He’ll take you back to Caitlin. We’ve got a few hours of work to do here; wait with her. I’ll need to speak with Lord Grammayre after the debriefing.” He growled, and added, “Stay out of trouble. If Teela and Tain make it back to the office in one piece,” and he glanced at them and growled again, “keep away from them.”
Teela raised a brow, but was wise enough—or amused enough—to make no comment.
Kaylin looked at Clint, who was watching her, arms folded across his broad chest. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t frown, either; he just nodded. “Go straight there.”
The moon was full and low; the sky was the type of clear only the coldest of winter sees. But it wasn’t cold. Kaylin knew because she was in it. Clint had made clear that holding on as tightly as she wanted to was just one side of strangulation—the wrong side—and she’d done her best to relax her grip; to let him do the work.
To trust him to carry her.
“He’s not mad at me?” She raised her voice when the wind grew louder.
“The Sergeant? No. He will be when the paperwork hits his desk, but you’ve got the brains to hide behind Caitlin.” His arms tightened briefly. “He’s Leontine. He’s practical. There’s no way those men would have survived the end of their trial.” He was quiet for a moment, and his eyes were a soft shade of ash-gray. They looked odd; the rest of his face was so dark and so warm. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” he added, because he knew she was afraid. “But I know it won’t happen without a fight. You’re too damn young to be a Hawk.
“But without you, there’d be four more corpses in the morgue. Teela won’t let anyone forget, and Barrani memory is perfect. Just remember when you start basic training: you wanted to be here.”
Directly to the Halls took an hour, and it passed over parts of the City the carriage hadn’t. She pointed at things. She asked him a hundred questions. He answered them all, his voice low and deep, coming somewhere from his chest. She didn’t want to land, but landing—like waking—was going to happen anyway, so she tried to remember everything, because memory, no one could steal.
It was late, and the office should have been empty, but Caitlin was there, at her desk, her mirror blank. She looked up when she saw Kaylin, and stood. Kaylin, still covered in blood—although it was mostly dry now—hesitated, and Caitlin walked around the desk toward her, where she engulfed her in a fierce hug. When she let go, she said, “I have food, dear. I’m certain you haven’t eaten.
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