“How long can we hold off our investigation? A day? Two?”
“If there’s reason for it, but—”
“It had better be a damn good reason?”
Tiamaris nodded.
“We can probably go there now,” she told him quietly. “It depends on how desperate we want Barren to think I am.”
“Desperate?”
“He’s sending a messenger with a letter for the Hawklord,” she told him, voice flat. “I can either fail to show or intercept the message before it crosses the bridge. If we go now, I have no doubt at all that we’ll be taken to Barren—but if I go now, he’ll know he has the upper hand.
“If I wait, he’ll be pretty damn certain he has it anyway—that’s Barren all over.”
“Does he?”
She swallowed. Glanced at the river that had been the dividing line of her life. “I don’t know,” she finally said.
“Then decide, Kaylin. You have the advantage of personal experience. I don’t.”
She nodded, grateful to him for at least that. If Barren thought he had the upper hand, he wasn’t likely to be careless; that level of laziness would never have kept the fiefs in his hands.
Finally, she exhaled. “We’ll take the risk. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain you, though. I don’t suppose you’d care to wait?”
“I would be delighted to wait,” he replied, in a tone of voice that was clearly the effect of serving, however briefly, with the Hawks. “I would not, however, survive it should it come to light.”
“Figures.” She shrugged and began to walk. “Let’s see what we’re up against.”
A Dragon brow rose over bronze eyes. “Please tell me,” he said, as he fell in step beside her, shortening his stride so he didn’t leave her behind, “that that is not the extent of your ability to plan.”
“I don’t generally make plans when I have no information.”
“Or at all?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see the point of planning everything when things could change in an eye blink. Let’s see what Barren’s got. We can plan then.”
“It is a small wonder to me,” Tiamaris replied, although he didn’t stop moving, “that you’ve survived to be the insignificant age you currently are.”
“Stand in line.”
CHAPTER 8
The Ablayne moved through the city in what was almost a circle. Kaylin, who had never been outside of the city, thought nothing of it; Tiamaris, who had, explained why. She tried to listen. But as she passed the bridge that connected her to Nightshade, and the part of her past that she wasn’t ashamed of, his words joined the buzz of the street’s crowds.
Although the merchant market was not located on the banks of the Ablayne, enterprising independents—who were often forced to move damn quickly, by tolls, Swords, and legitimate merchants—often set up small stalls near the river. Why, she never quite understood, but there was traffic.
She didn’t walk quickly and Tiamaris, while a Dragon Lord, wasn’t stupid. He stopped at the midpoint between the two bridges.
“Kaylin.”
She glanced at him.
“The Imperial Court knows what the Emperor knows,” he told her quietly.
She nodded.
“There is nothing to hide, not from me.”
“It’s not about hiding,” she told him, although she wasn’t certain she wasn’t lying. “Barren,” she said, swallowing, “is different. Look, it doesn’t matter. We’re going.” She started to walk, and she walked quickly. This wasn’t her beat; she didn’t have to fall into the steady, quiet walk that could take hours.
“What concerns you, now?”
She almost said nothing. But he was going where she was going; he had some right to know. “I don’t know what he wants from me. I don’t know what he knows about me. He implied he knows a lot, but that was always what he did. Imply knowledge, let people assume you know everything, and then pick up what you didn’t know from what they let slip.” She paused and then added, “He knows why I went to the Hawklord’s tower. He knows I’m not dead. He doesn’t know what happened.
“But there are only two conclusions he can draw. The first, that I tried to carry out his orders. The second, that I turned on him immediately.”
“The latter is the concern.”
“Let’s just say he’s a fief lord. You don’t get to keep your title—if it’s even that—if people can turn on you without consequences.”
“And you’re afraid of him?” Tiamaris’s brows rose. Both of them. He placed one hand on her shoulder. “You were thirteen years old when you left Barren. By the reckoning of your kind, you were barely out of childhood. You are not that child, now.” He glanced at her wrist, and she grimaced.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I almost forgot.” Opening the bracer and tossing it into the nearest trash heap or stretch of moving water was one of life’s little luxuries; today, it just didn’t seem to matter. She pressed the gems along the inside of the wrist in sequence, and waited for the familiar click of freedom. When it came, she pulled the bracer free, exposing, for just a moment, the blue-black lines, swirls, and dots of the marks that encompassed over half her body.
“I had these marks, then,” she told him softly, pulling her arm back and tossing the bracer in a wide, glinting arc that ended with an audible splash. “I thought they would kill me.”
“They may, yet,” was his reply. From his expression, she thought it was meant to be comforting. Dragons had pretty damn strange ideas of what passed for comfort. He began to walk; it was clear he knew the way to Barren.
“How many other fiefs did you visit?” Kaylin asked him.
“Pardon?”
“You entered Castle Nightshade, before you met me.”
“Ah.”
“Did you go to Barren?”
“No. I went, however, to Illien in its time. The borders are largely the same. Or,” he added, “they were.”
“And the others?”
“Some of the others.”
“Why?”
This particular nothing stretched out for a while. Which meant he wasn’t going to answer. She obligingly changed topics as the bridge across the Ablayne came into view. It was a narrower bridge than the one that crossed from Nightshade.
Standing on the other side of the narrow bridge, lounging against the rails, was a figure she recognized.
Morse.
Morse smiled. The scar that marred the line of her upper lip stretched as she did, whitening. Morse’s smile could scare a much larger man into silence. Kaylin had seen it happen. “You’re tricked out,” she said, nodding at the surcoat.
“You’re not.”
“Not more than usual.” Morse ran her fingers through the short brush of her dark hair. The ring that pierced her left eyebrow glinted in the sun, which was near its height. “Had some word that you might be by,” she added, still lounging.
Kaylin shrugged. “I bet. I’m here.”
“And not that happy about it?” Morse rose, then. “Happens. Who’s your friend?”
“A Hawk,” Kaylin replied. It was always touch and go, with Morse, unless the seven years had changed her a lot.
“No kidding.” The smile deserted her face. “We don’t need groundhawks on this side of the border, if you take my meaning.”
“Fine. Tell Barren that.” Kaylin folded her arms across her chest.
Morse was silent for a long moment, and Kaylin watched the ring that pierced her brow. It was—it had been—a decent indicator of Morse’s moods, which could turn on a half-copper without warning. If it dipped or it rose too rapidly, you were on shaky ground. If it stayed steady, regardless of the words or the threat, you probably had a few more guaranteed minutes of life.
It was steady, now.
Kaylin? Not so much.
And if Kaylin had learned to read Morse seven years ago, Morse had also learned to read Kaylin. “Eli,” she said quietly, the word completely neutral. “He should never ha
ve sent you across the river.”
Kaylin said nothing. Nothing much to say. But she didn’t correct Morse’s use of her name, because to Morse, she was Elianne. Not more, not less.
“Why did he?” Kaylin heard herself ask. She almost bit off her own tongue, because she realized it was the only thing she could do that would stop it from flapping.
Morse shrugged, and turned her glance toward the sluggishly moving waters of the Ablayne; it had been a dry season, so far. “Ask him,” she finally said.
“I don’t care what he thinks,” Kaylin replied. The part of her that was shouting shut up was seven years too old. “I want to know why you let him.” The part of her that was seven years too old didn’t matter.
“Let him? Have you forgotten who’s the fief lord and who’s the grunt here?”
That should have shut Kaylin up. It should have. But an anger that she hadn’t felt in years was burning her mouth, and the only way not to be consumed by it was to open that damn mouth and let it out.
“I was thirteen, Morse. I was stupid.” How old had she been before she finally realized that it was just a setup, just a way of killing her at a distance? Fourteen? Fifteen? Twenty?
“You were one of his best, even then.”
“Doesn’t say much about the rest of his recruits, does it?” Kaylin spit to the left. It was the Barren equivalent of Leontine cursing. She did not, however, aim at Morse; that was the Barren equivalent of telling the Emperor to shove off. “I wasn’t good enough to do what he ordered me to do. I could’ve spent another decade, and I would never be that good. He couldn’t have expected me to succeed.” Her voice rose in the stillness. She tried to throttle it back. But her hands were shaking.
You thought you didn’t care, she told herself in bitter fury. You thought it was all in the past. It was done. You could walk away. And she had. She’d walked. Now she was walking back. Funny, how the fires you didn’t put out the first time were there to burn your sorry butt when you returned.
“You thought you could.” Neutral. The ring hadn’t budged.
Kaylin, however, was past caring. Stung, she said, “Yes, I thought I could. You told me I could, and I believed it.”
“You wanted to believe it,” Morse said, and for the first time, the brow ring did shift—it went down. “You always did. You always wanted some damn thing to believe in. ‘Am I good enough, yet? Am I ready? Will I ever be ready?’” The mimicry was harsh.
And it was deserved. Kaylin, white, stood on the rise of the narrow bridge, looking down at Morse and trying to remember how to breathe.
“If he wanted me dead,” she said, when she’d remembered as much as she was going to be capable of, “why didn’t he just tell you to kill me?”
Morse was utterly silent.
It was the wrong type of silence. “Morse?”
The world was shifting beneath Kaylin’s feet. It wasn’t just the boundaries of Barren, it wasn’t the shadows of the past. The past never truly died, anyway; you just boxed it up and put it in storage, hoping it wouldn’t come back to bite you later. But it did, and sometimes you bled.
“You weren’t the only one who was young and stupid,” Morse finally said. “Seven years, Eli. A lot can change in seven years.” She shoved her hands into pockets, and away from the hilts of her very prominent daggers, as if that was all that kept her from drawing them. “You coming, or what?” She turned and stepped off the bridge. Morse hadn’t been big on symbolism; a dagger was a dagger, a fist was a fist and a corpse was a corpse, although admittedly she took some joy in creating them in the right situation.
But Kaylin? At thirteen, Morse’s harsh words notwithstanding, she had looked for signs and portents. She cringed at the memory. “Yeah. Coming. But not without my friend.”
“Suit yourself.” Morse shrugged.
“You expected me to come alone?”
“I didn’t expect you to come at all,” Morse snapped. “I thought you’d gotten smarter in seven fucking years.” She did turn, then. Apparently, they were both being burned by the same damn fire. “I watched you, Eli. I watched you in these damn streets for weeks.
“I saw you with your new friends. I saw your shiny uniform. I saw you at work. Only you could find a fucking Lord whose idea of a reward for an assassination attempt was a fucking job.”
It was Kaylin’s turn to pause. Other people’s anger often had the effect of dampening hers; there was only so much fuel for fire, after all. And put that way, her whole life seemed so damn improbable. She swallowed. Offered Morse a very familiar shrug. “Yeah,” she finally said.
“I knew you, then. He thinks you turned, you must have turned.” Morse folded arms across her chest. “But I know you. You tried.”
It shouldn’t have been a comfort, to hear that admission. Shouldn’t, but it was. “Yeah. I tried.”
“And if you tried, Barren’s got nothing on you. Nothing. What the fuck are you doing here, Eli?” Morse vented her spleen on a stone. It travelled a long damn distance before it struck a wall.
“My job,” Kaylin replied.
“The Law doesn’t come into the fiefs.” She pointed at the Hawk emblazoned across Kaylin’s chest.
Kaylin nodded.
“We don’t need you, here.”
“You probably never did.”
At that, Morse grinned. It wasn’t pleasant. “You got that right. Come on. Barren’s expecting you.”
Kaylin cringed. “I hope I’m not costing you anything.”
“It was a small bet,” Morse replied, shrugging. “Barren’s been…tense. No one’s been up for a big one.” She turned and began to walk down the streets.
Barren didn’t employ Barrani guards. No surprise, there. Barrani power structure generally demanded that the most obviously powerful person be in charge, and in the Barrani view of power, the most old and decrepit of their number—and how they decided who this was, given that none of the damn Barrani ever aged, Kaylin didn’t know—was easily a match for a human, no matter how deadly he was.
It wasn’t always true, but it was true enough. If there were Barrani working in Barren, they’d be working from the top, not for it.
However, in Kaylin’s memory of Barren, the lack of Barrani enforcers didn’t make that much difference to the people who eked out a living in the streets of the fiefs; she might as well have been in Nightshade. Morse was one of Barren’s lieutenants; people knew it, somehow. They saw her, and they moved to one side of the street or the other, falling silent and getting out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible.
They did, however, stare—but Kaylin knew they weren’t staring at Morse; they were staring at her. And at Tiamaris. She glanced at the Dragon Lord and grimaced; he walked as if he owned the street. Then again, it was a street full of humans, most of them in mismatched or poorly fitted clothing; they had no weapons besides the simple knives almost anyone wore, and those weren’t about to be drawn anytime soon.
She knew these streets. Not as well as she knew Nightshade, but then again, she hadn’t seen as much of Barren. She hadn’t been born to it, and she hadn’t grown up in the shadow of its Castle, because it didn’t have one. But…this could have been Nightshade.
She hadn’t seen it, when she’d lived here, walking by Morse’s side, as she did now.
“Tomorrow,” she told Tiamaris under her breath, “we ditch the uniforms.”
“As you say.”
Three blocks into Barren, Morse met up with a patrol. It was a patrol only in the fief sense of the word; to Kaylin’s eye it was a lounging group of men in armor, wearing obvious swords. They looked about as friendly as Morse did, but where Morse was laconic and disturbing, they looked nervous.
Seeing Tiamaris didn’t help, although Kaylin thought only one of the four men recognized him for what he was. She didn’t ask, and as she had no intention of speaking to them, she didn’t feel the need to point it out.
“Barren got the message,” the man in the lead said. “We’re her
e to help out, if you need it.” He grinned at Kaylin; he was missing one of his lower teeth. “Fief’s a big place,” he told her. “We wouldn’t want you wandering off and getting lost.”
“Lost,” she told him curtly, “is what you can get.”
He whistled, and followed it up with a chuckle that was condescending enough Kaylin’s hands curled into fists. “That tone don’t work on this side of the bridge,” he told her. “Here, we’re the law.”
“Oh? I thought Barren was.”
“We work for Barren,” the man replied, losing the smile.
“What, everyone competent got eaten?”
“Eli,” Morse said sharply.
Kaylin ignored her. “Or maybe anyone competent crossed the bridge.” She shifted stance, and waited.
She didn’t have to wait long. He smiled, shrugged, and turned away as if to walk; it was a feint. She knew it because she’d used it.
When he turned back, it was sudden; the smile hadn’t left his lips but it had frozen there, as if he’d forgotten he’d left it behind. He swung in with his left arm, but he swung high, and she shifted her head, avoiding his hand easily while she waited for the second swing. It came in low, toward her stomach; she slid to the side, grabbed his wrist, and used his momentum to toss him to the side.
“Carl, stuff it. We don’t have time,” Morse said.
Carl listened about as well as Kaylin did. He stumbled, but he didn’t lose his bearing—not until Kaylin snapped out with a foot and kicked him hard in the butt. His knees hit the dirt, followed quickly by his hands. Kaylin backed up and waited for him to regain his footing.
Carl—a man she didn’t recognize—rose. This time, he was carrying a weapon. A short knife. Serrated edges. That must have cost him enough to justify the money he hadn’t spent on clothing.
Morse swore. Kaylin bent her knees, but she didn’t draw a dagger in response. She waited. Carl bent into his knees, as well, throwing the dagger from one hand to the other. Kaylin said, and did, nothing. She understood that he was attempting to intimidate her, but as he was the one who’d just picked his sorry self off the street, she wasn’t impressed.
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