When he lunged, it wasn’t even a surprise. He was good at keeping expression off his face, she’d give him that; she couldn’t read movements from the subtle changes there. But she could read them from the rest of his body language; from the slight shift in shoulder, the minute differences as he shifted weight. It was a decision.
She didn’t see what the result of that decision was, however.
Morse, looking bored, kicked him in the side of the head. He reeled back, but he was now being careful enough that he didn’t fall; he used momentum to get the hell out of her way. Smarter man than Kaylin had initially given him credit for.
The Hawk? It didn’t scare him at all. Kaylin was, in his eyes, the law, and that had only one meaning in Barren: she was hampered, prissy, correct.
Morse was none of those things. If Carl worked for Barren, Morse helped Barren run the fief, and the death of someone stupid enough to attack her wouldn’t cause Barren to blink twice. Or once, really.
Carl showed some sign of intelligence. He sheathed the dagger and raised both of his hands. He lowered them quickly and leapt back as Morse kicked out again.
“Morse!” he shouted. “I’m done! I’m done!”
“Almost,” she snapped, spitting to the side. “Listen, you sorry piece of shit. You’re not insulting her. You’re insulting me. You just told them both that I need your help to escort them through Barren.”
Carl paled.
“Stop using your brains as fucking seat warmers.” She looked at Carl, but it was clear she was speaking to all of them. And all of them had a pretty clear idea of just how stupid it was to insult Morse in any way. “You can all back the fuck off,” she added. “Unless you want to—”
“We’re off, we’re off,” Carl said, nodding to the men who had, Kaylin noted, already started to retreat toward the wall of the nearest building. Morse shrugged, shoved hands into pockets and began to walk away. Kaylin, ignoring them, followed.
Tiamaris had not lifted a hand.
When they were four blocks past the patrol, Morse laughed. She’d never had a girlish laugh, and she hadn’t, in seven years, developed one. Her voice was deep, rich, and clearly amused; it was also tinged with contempt and easy malice.
Kaylin froze and had just enough time to duck, which meant Morse’s fist connected with air. Morse did not, however, lose balance; her hand just stopped about an inch past the back of where Kaylin’s head had been.
But the laughter had been real; it wasn’t a feint. It was one of the things that made Morse so unpredictable. “I’d’ve let you dust him off,” Morse said, as if the jab were a shake of the hand and meant in a friendly way, “but that’d make you look too good and the rest of us look too incompetent. Can’t have the Law looking tougher than the rest of us.”
“Yeah, sorry. I should’ve ignored him, but you know how much I hate—”
Morse raised a hand. “You’ve changed,” she told Kaylin. “But not that much. Yeah, I could see that coming once he’d opened his stupid mouth.”
“We’ll lose the Hawk tomorrow. If we’re back tomorrow.”
“You mean, if you leave?”
“That, too.” Kaylin shrugged. “You have any idea what Barren wants?”
“Some.”
“And you’re not sharing.”
Morse shook her head. “I could knife that idiot and leave him bleeding in the street and Barren? He’d laugh. But not this.”
Kaylin nodded again. She glanced at the streets, and the run-down buildings, at the faded stalls, peopled by men and women who still managed to shout to attract their custom. They did not, she noted, shout at Morse.
The fief of Barren was very like the fief of Nightshade in this regard; the streets were grungier, and the buildings weren’t kept up well. But the people? They still filled the streets—in any space that Morse wasn’t moving through.
They met two more patrols, but these, Morse headed off. Kaylin, on the other hand, managed to keep her twitching hands by her sides in deference to Morse; she understood that the first pat had been a test. Whether she’d passed or failed, she didn’t know. Shouldn’t have cared.
But dammit, she almost did.
She had no illusion about the length of the walk; it wasn’t going to be a short one. Morse took her down streets that were tantalizingly familiar. This wasn’t Nightshade, it was never going to be Nightshade, but Kaylin had lived here for six months, and those months had left their mark.
More than their mark.
“Hey, Eli?”
“Hmm?”
“Where’d you get the tattoo?”
Kaylin’s hand rose to her cheek. With a grimace, she forced her hand to fall. “It was a gift,” she said, lips twisting, “from Nightshade.”
Morse stared at her. “His mark?”
“You’ve heard something.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. Well. I hear a lot.”
Kaylin didn’t ask her what she’d heard, although she wanted to know. Morse wouldn’t give her anything, and it would make Kaylin look weak. Weak and Morse were not a very good combination on most days.
“Look, my companion—”
“Dragon.” No question at all in Morse’s voice. “Not bad looking, either.”
“Is a Dragon Lord. He’s a Hawk, but he’s part of the Emperor’s Court.”
Morse shrugged. “Here, that means diddly.”
“True. But he can—” Tiamaris caught her arm, and pressed his fingers into it. Kaylin thought they would leave a bruise, but she took his meaning and shut up.
Morse, watching them, assessed their relative power. It was what she did, and she did it before she remembered to do almost anything else in a day. Like, say, breathe. But she frowned as Tiamaris lowered his hand. “You any good in a fight?” she asked Tiamaris.
“I have been trained,” he replied at length. Clearly, talking to the streetlife of Barren was designated a Kaylin job.
“Good. Because we’re about to cross Old Holdstock.”
Kaylin frowned as the street name conjured up a hazy image of the Barren geography she knew. “So?”
“Things have changed in seven years,” Morse told her. “I heard you were good. You’d better be.”
The first thing Kaylin noticed was the sudden change in population density in the streets. Without thinking, she glanced at the position of the sun; it was still high. High enough that the streets shouldn’t have been this empty. But they were, for the fief; there were one or two people who, scurrying between buildings, glanced furtively over their shoulders, but there were few others.
No children, for one. No one playing in the street. No one glancing longingly at the relative finery of the Imperial uniform and daydreaming about mugging a Hawk, rifling their pockets, and stealing their weapons and armor.
Kaylin glanced at Morse, as if to confirm what she saw. Morse had gone from bored, which was her resting state, to watchful. She didn’t look scared, but Morse would die laughing, grinning or screaming in rage; Morse didn’t have a register left for something as pathetic as fear.
Kaylin did. She hated it, but she did. She could feel her shoulders tense, her hands curve round the hilt of her daggers. She glanced over her shoulder, and instead of Severn, saw Tiamaris. But he still wore the Hawk, and he was still a comfort, regardless.
The road continued, bending slightly to the right, toward the boundary of the fief itself. Barren didn’t live on the edge—almost no one did—but he lived as close as a man could, in safety. It was one of his boasts, and one of the things that made him so feared. It also made him damn hard to reach.
But at least at the moment she didn’t have to turn a blind eye to what was happening on the streets; nothing was. She could see faces in open windows, and through the turned slats of warped shutters; that was it. Here, in the heart of Barren, there was very little in the way of glass. It made the winters cold.
Cold.
She stopped walking as the shadows at her feet suddenly sharpened and len
gthened. Turning, she looked up to see the tower.
“Eli?”
And down, to see the broken, slanting fence, rust eating through metal, and grass, taller than her waist, hiding stones. Hiding children, she thought, remembering her first night in Barren.
“It was here, wasn’t it?” she asked Morse.
Tiamaris spoke her rank. But she was in Barren, now; rank didn’t matter. It wasn’t a name.
Morse turned to glance at the tower. She frowned; the frown was slow to clear. “Yeah,” she finally said. “I think you’re right.”
“About what?” Tiamaris asked, looking at them both oddly.
“This,” Kaylin told him softly, “is where Morse first found me.”
Tiamaris looked at the tower, and then he looked back at Kaylin. “She found you here?”
“I ran. From Nightshade.”
“Across the border.”
She nodded.
“You didn’t feel the transition.”
“It wasn’t the—the internal border. It was just a street.”
Tiamaris said nothing for a long moment. “You ran from Nightshade to here. Why did you stop?”
She pointed at the tall grass. If the fief had changed in seven years, the grass apparently hadn’t. “I needed a place to sleep,” she told him evenly, her gaze falling on things that existed only in memory. “I needed a place to hide. There weren’t many open doors, not for me, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have taken them.
“I was tired. I was—” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “The grass was tall, then. Just as tall. The fence was just as broken. I stepped through the opening there, and I burrowed into the grass.”
He frowned. “Which opening, Private?”
So much the Dragon, Tiamaris was. Cautious, as well. He didn’t use her name—which he used at any other time—in Morse’s hearing. We don’t have true names, she thought. She wanted to tell him that. We just have tags that people use to get our attention.
“There.”
Tiamaris frowned. Kaylin frowned, as well, but it wasn’t the same expression. She snorted, mumbled a brief apology to Morse, and then headed toward the break in the fence, where the iron tines had fallen away and the grass—she could still see it—had grown through.
“Here.” She tried not to use his name, but she was human.
Tiamaris glanced at Morse. “You found her here?” he asked, in entirely the wrong tone of voice. It wasn’t that he was angry or threatening; he wasn’t. But the question implied knowledge. In fact, it implied a shared knowledge—between him and Morse.
Morse shrugged. “She was on the other side of the fence,” she finally told the Dragon Lord. “Huddling over there in the grass.”
“How did you see her?”
“In my line of work?” Morse laughed. It was bitter and sharp; it was also short. “You don’t notice something as simple as someone huddling in grass where they shouldn’t be, you’re generally called a corpse.”
“Did Morse come in to fetch you?” Tiamaris asked Kaylin.
“No.”
“You came out to her.”
“Yes. Look, Tiamaris, what the hell is going on here?”
“If I am correct, Private, neither Morse nor I can see the opening at which you are pointing.”
She started to tell him that Morse had, in fact, seen something once, but bit the words back. They weren’t relevant here.
CHAPTER 9
Kaylin walked over to the gap in the fence. She didn’t push her way past either Morse or Tiamaris, but it was a near thing. She had always hated being the odd man out, especially when it came to information or secrets. Yes, this was unreasonable. She’d just have to live with it.
She passed through the fence, stood in the grass. Heard the wind through it; felt the heat of the sun. It wasn’t high summer, but without enough of a sea breeze it was damn hot when she was kitted out. Another thing she’d learned to live with. The days when she could just shuck her clothing and run mostly naked through the streets had died even before her mother had.
She was tired. She hadn’t slept well, but she never did when she was worried. The midwives hadn’t called, and there were no emergencies at the foundling hall. In all, she couldn’t complain. She wanted to, mind. Barren was a threat. But…he was a threat she could almost understand.
The worst he could do was remind people she knew of who she really was. Or who, she thought, almost dispassionately, she had once been. Had she changed? Had she really changed?
Standing here, the answer had to be no.
She remembered this place so clearly. And she remembered, as she turned, seeing Morse that first time.
Barren: Elianne
She woke, damp with dew, chilled by it. Small burrs clung to her hair. Steffi liked to brush them out, so she didn’t mind them too much.
Steffi.
She sat up, gagging, her empty stomach all that prevented her from throwing up in the long grass. Sunlight slanted between buildings, between crooked, leaning fence posts. It was morning. She wasn’t certain where she was but she knew one thing: she was alive. The ferals whose voices were always a distant chill had hunted elsewhere.
She could see sunlight, but she wasn’t in it, and she listened carefully before she began to move out of the long shadows cast by the building at her back. That building was tall—taller than Castle Nightshade—but it seemed in poor repair; there were obvious cracks in the stone and what looked like loose mortar. Mortar. Severn had taught her that.
Her hands became fists, and she tore up grass before she realized she was doing it. He was gone. He wasn’t dead, not yet. But he would be.
Pulling her sleeves down to cover the marks on her arms, Elianne glanced over her shoulder and froze.
Someone was standing in the opening she’d slipped through, watching her. It was not immediately clear to her whether or not that someone was male or female; the hair was cropped so short you could see skull through it in the morning light, the face was square, the jaws wide. But beneath a leather tunic, she thought she saw the slight swell of breasts; it was either that or fat, and while the figure seemed large to her, none of that girth suggested fat.
In the fiefs, people seldom grew fat.
“Strange place to hide.” Woman’s voice.
Elianne found herself relaxing, but only slightly. She stood, parting grass. “It was here,” she said quietly, “or the streets.”
The woman raised a brow; a scar bisected the left side. A scar also adorned her upper lip, in a puckered, obvious white. “Family toss you out? Or did you pull a runner?”
Elianne shrugged. “Ran,” she said. Not that it’s any of your business. She kept those words to herself. The woman didn’t look unfriendly. But given the scars on her face, she didn’t exactly look safe, either, even though Elianne knew many people who had scars. Scars, she’d been told, just meant you’d survived. Or that you could.
“I’m Morse,” the woman said. “You?”
“Elianne.” Don’t tell them your real name. Severn’s voice. She hated it. Hating it, she disobeyed. What difference would it make, anyway?
“Where do you live?”
“Over by the Four Corners.”
Morse frowned; the movement flattened the scar. “What’s the fief?” she finally asked.
It was Elianne’s turn to frown. “Nightshade.”
Morse whistled. “You’re not in Nightshade now,” she said, casually.
“Not…in Nightshade.”
“You’re in Barren.”
“Barren.”
Hearing what Elianne didn’t say, Morse shrugged. “You pulled a runner, and you crossed the border. You going to stay in there all damn day? I got things to do.” It was almost an invitation. She waited.
“Here’s as good as anywhere.”
“Suit yourself.” Morse turned. Walked a few feet. Stopped. She didn’t turn back, but her voice drifted over her shoulder. “You got no family here. No friends. You m
ight want to make some.”
“What are you offering?” Elianne asked quietly. She asked it of the woman’s back; the woman still hadn’t turned.
“What do you want?”
“I want to be able to kill a man.”
Morse laughed. Still laughing, she did turn. “Kid,” she said, when the laughter had eased enough that she could speak, “you came to the right place.”
“Private?”
Kaylin shook herself. The memory had been so clear she could almost step into it. I want to be able to kill a man.
She could have asked for food or shelter. Those would have been a better, saner, place to start. Of course, she thought with a grimace, they wouldn’t have done much for Morse. “Sorry. I was just—I was thinking.”
Tiamaris snorted. “Do you mind thinking on this side of the fence?”
“Why?”
He glanced at Morse. Morse shrugged.
“Because short of removing the fence itself—”
“Don’t try,” Morse told him. Something in her voice had shifted from dead bored to serious.
Tiamaris raised a brow.
“I don’t fancy scraping bits of you off the street.”
He snorted again. “I’m not certain how you’d be able to distinguish them from the rest of the detritus.”
“I am.” Morse folded her arms. This was not generally considered a fighting stance in most people.
“Tiamaris,” Kaylin said, more sharply than she’d intended. “Don’t.”
He raised one dark brow, and then offered her a shrug in place of action. “I believe,” he told her quietly, “that the attempt will have to be made sooner or later.”
“Make it later.”
“As you say. Will you join us?”
She nodded. But she turned to look at the tower before she left the tall grass behind. At thirteen, it had been just another run-down building in a very strange place, and given what she’d just experienced, a building didn’t matter.
Now? She thought it old, and given the look and patina of age, she was surprised that it was still standing. It was wide at base—wider than a solid fief house—and it narrowed very little as it stretched toward sky. The stones that had gone into its construction were half Kaylin’s height, and twice that in width, at least at the upper foundation.
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