Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “What was?”

  “The creature we met in the middle of the fief. It was wandering around on the streets like a great misshapen nightmare, trying to blast holes in things with its eye beams. It didn’t do too badly with teeth and claws, either, if it comes to that.”

  “You met this during the day?”

  She nodded. Looked out the carriage window.

  “Kaylin—”

  “Yeah, it’s worse,” she told him softly. “I don’t even know what Barren wanted from me. I know it should matter. It probably will—but right now it doesn’t.” She felt one of his hands on the back of hers, and she looked up at him. “We had ferals for nightmares,” she told him softly. “In Nightshade. We had ferals. They have—they have—” she shook her head. “They’re going to get eaten, or worse.”

  He knew who she meant.

  “And at this point, Severn? They’re fighting a holding action, but they’re losing ground day by day. I don’t know if there’s anything—anything at all—that they can do.”

  “Or that you can?”

  “Or,” she said, bitterly, “that I can.” She held out her arms, sleeves hiding the marks upon her skin.

  “You’ll do what you can.”

  “I know. But what I can do, right now, doesn’t seem like very much.” She thought about the old woman, her wide and unseeing eyes an accusation.

  “Kaylin,” he said quietly. And then, when she failed to look up, “Elianne.”

  She looked, then. He stiffened for just a second at what he saw in her face, but the stiffness didn’t hold him. He lifted a hand, cupped her cheek—the cheek that also bore Nightshade’s mark—and left his hand, warm, callused, resting against her skin.

  She stiffened, as well, but like his, hers was brief. And then she closed her eyes and leaned into the warmth of his hand.

  “Stop judging your life only by the failures,” he whispered.

  “What should I do?” she whispered. “I’m always going to fail.”

  “We all do,” he said softly, his voice closer now. “We all fail. But none of us fail all of the time.”

  Debriefing, as Tiamaris called it, took some time. Luckily for Kaylin, it was Tiamaris’s time. They both got out of the carriage in the usual courtyard, leaving Severn behind, and they both entered the halls through the same guard posts, but they separated when they reached the interior. Tiamaris pointed her in the direction of Sanabalis’s rooms and walked off.

  Sanabalis was not actually in his rooms, but the doors were slightly ajar; she didn’t have to touch the obnoxious doorwards that littered the palace doors like cheap paint. She was grateful for that, and grateful, as well, for the dinner that was set out on the small table in the sitting room. She wanted to call it a parlor, but thought it was too big for that, and she couldn’t quite remember what else to call it.

  Since it didn’t matter, she grabbed the closest chair and tried to slide it across the carpet. It weighed more than she did. She grimaced and moved the small table instead, curling her legs beneath her and picking up bread rolls and a knife. Butter, beef, cheese and an assortment of fruit were also present; it wasn’t a fancy meal.

  But she’d missed lunch, and while she didn’t feel like eating, she was hungry. She ate. That much, years of fief living had made habit. Eating in silence was less of a habit, but she’d only be talking to herself; she was quiet.

  At length the quiet drove her out of her chair and toward the grand windows that the room boasted. Framed in its panels were the Halls of Law, flags flying at full mast in the breeze high above the city streets. She could see the occasional Aerian flying in that breeze, as well, and as often happened, she felt a pang of envy for the gift of flight.

  When she’d first met the rest of the Hawks, she had daydreamed endlessly about waking up one day possessed of wings. She had pestered every Aerian who was on active duty and wasn’t injured to take her flying, and almost every Hawk had complied, some grumbling as they did. They didn’t really understand why she’d loved flight; it was like loving walking, to them.

  But the streets looked so small and so quiet from the heights. The problems that plagued anyone who happened to live on the ground seemed to vanish. For whole minutes at a time, she felt as if she had shed her past, and all the crimes and failures it contained.

  Landing was always hard.

  This time she’d landed in Barren.

  She turned away from the window, and then back, staring at the Halls. It shouldn’t be like this. The Law shouldn’t be confined by something as small as a river, and it shouldn’t be limited by something as terrifying as shadow. It should cover the whole damn city. The Emperor should care about the people in Barren, or Nightshade, or Liatt—any of the fiefs. It wasn’t as if the people who lived in them had any choice about where they were born, or how or to who. They didn’t deserve to be abandoned.

  They didn’t deserve to die the way the old woman had died.

  Her hands became fists as she stared.

  “Bad?”

  She glanced up at the window, and at the shadow of Lord Sanabalis’s reflection. It was not yet dark enough for that reflection to be more than a shadow. She shrugged, pure fief gesture, and turned.

  Tiamaris was standing just behind Sanabalis.

  “The Arkon will join us in a few moments,” Sanabalis told her.

  Great.

  “He was not greatly pleased that Lord Tiamaris failed to observe everything that occurred. Nor,” Sanabalis added, “was the Emperor.”

  “He had his reasons.”

  “They were good reasons,” the Dragon Lord who was also her only teacher said. “Which is why Tiamaris will continue his duties.”

  “Who would I have been stuck with—accompanied by, otherwise?”

  “Suffice it to say that you are happy with the outcome.” He glanced at the relocated table. “I’m happy to see that you ate,” he added, in a tone of voice which clearly said put things back where you found them. It was a neat trick. She tidied while he took his customary chair.

  Tiamaris seated himself as far from Sanabalis as one could, given the arrangement of the chairs, which told Kaylin as much as she wanted to know about how the debriefing had gone.

  The Arkon arrived some fifteen minutes later. He entered the room and took a seat, nodding to both Tiamaris and Sanabalis; he failed to offer Kaylin a nod until she retreated from the window. She did with some speed.

  “Lord Tiamaris has informed us of some of the events that occurred in the fief today,” he told Kaylin when she was seated. “We would like to hear from you.”

  She grimaced. “Hear from, or extract a memory crystal?”

  “At the moment, the words will do. The crystals are not inexpensive and they are not trivial to manufacture. This conversation is, of course, being observed and will be entered into Imperial Records. Some comparison of the information contained in your crystal and the words you speak today will of necessity be done. We are, however, aware of the ways in which human memory is fallible.

  “Lord Tiamaris has said, when he became aware of the incursion of shadow—and the possibility of shadowstorm—he did not proceed into the area of the fief that was thus afflicted. You, however, did.”

  She nodded. And hesitated. One glance at Tiamaris’s shuttered expression told her she was going to get no help from that quarter.

  The Arkon however said, “Lord Tiamaris did mention that what you saw and what he saw were substantially different. You claimed that the shadow was sigiled.”

  “That’s what it looked like to me but—” and here, she transferred her glance to Sanabalis “—I’ve only seen something like it once, and it was a hell of a lot smaller.”

  “Where?” Sanabalis asked quietly.

  “In the Leontine quarter,” she replied. “The magic of the tainted.”

  His gaze was sharp, and his eyes were an unfortunate shade of bronze, which Kaylin tried not to take personally. “The exact sigil?”

  “No
.” She shook her head. “I don’t think—I know I don’t know enough about magic, but I don’t think any two shadow sigils would be exactly the same.”

  Sanabalis and the Arkon exchanged a glance. It was, sadly, a significant glance, and of a type that would normally have caused Kaylin to demand an explanation in an office meeting. On the other hand, aside from Marcus, no one in the office was likely to rip her throat out or reduce her to ash for making such demands. She was pretty sure Sanabalis wouldn’t; the Arkon, on the other hand? Not so much.

  “You know enough,” Sanabalis finally said. “But remember—what you see and what our magic shows us is not the same.”

  “It looked like a sigil the size of, oh, the Wolf Tower. Tiamaris couldn’t see it—”

  “We are aware of Tiamaris’s perceptions,” the Arkon said, in a brittle tone of voice. “They are not, now, our concern. His understanding is greater than yours, and any information of use on that subject has already been extracted.”

  “But he did something, and then he said it was a—a storm.”

  “As I said—”

  Sanabalis lifted a hand. To the Arkon he said, “She is not of the Court, and not of our kind. It is possible that she requires more explanation than we have given.”

  “It should not affect her observations. They happen independent of—”

  “It will affect what she observes and understands in future.”

  The Arkon’s silence was chilly, and Sanabalis didn’t break it again. But after a moment, the oldest of the Dragons present gave a very curt nod. His eyes were hard to see in this light; Kaylin wasn’t certain why. She could read very little of his mood from their color.

  Lord Sanabalis then turned fully to Kaylin. “Ask,” he said curtly, as if aware that questions were trying to break out from between the tight line of her compressed lips.

  “What is a shadowstorm?”

  Sanabalis hesitated, and this time, the Arkon snorted. “Oh, no,” he said, lifting a hand. “I leave the explanation, in its entirety, to you.”

  Tiamaris coughed.

  Sanabalis grimaced.

  Kaylin felt, for just a moment, as if she were thirteen years old again, and in the exotic comfort of Marcus’s den, surrounded by wives who were more experienced, and far more knowledgeable, than she. They had been both terrifying and strangely attractive, and she had sat, in one corner, watching them as they rolled over and around each other, touching—always touching—unselfconsciously. They were clearly all individuals, they had different personalities, different colors, chose different words; you could even distinguish their snarls with a little practice. But they were a family.

  They weren’t what she was. They had never been what she was. They could kill—she knew that, had developed at least that much instinct in Barren—but they didn’t. And they watched the outsider, gave her space, and left just enough of an opening that she could, if she wanted, find some way in.

  But the way into the pridlea was a way into something that was warm, inclusive, and nurturing—if perhaps a bit bruising at times, because the cubs played rough. What the three Dragons offered was different.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted it, either. But they watched her, and after a moment, she said, “This has something to do with true names.” She meant it as a question, but it came out flat.

  They exchanged another glance, but this time, the Arkon nodded.

  “The Barrani—”

  “The Barrani would suffer the effect of a storm in a similar way. To you,” he added, “there would be very little difference.”

  “Why?”

  She thought no one would answer. It was, to her surprise, the Arkon who chose to do so. “It is the nature of our life, and of life as it began. We are our names, Kaylin. You will not and cannot see them as they are. What you see,” he added, “is significant, but it is significant to you, as the bearer of those marks. The shadows and the darkness are things out of which something akin to life comes, but it is a chaos that knows and accepts no order, no governance, and no rules.” He lifted a hand. “I speak not of rules of law or etiquette, but of simple biology. There are rules that govern birth, life, death, that make us in some sense what we are.

  “What we are, however, is bound to the names that move us and give us life. The storms can change those.”

  “But—”

  “The change can be either brutally obvious or subtle. It can be physical,” he added, “or it can go almost—almost—undetected.” He paused, and then rose. “Sanabalis and Tiamaris are both too young to remember the shadowstorms of my youth.

  “But I remember them.” He walked to the window and stared out. “They do not come, now. That much was won. The Old Ones do not walk at the heart of the storm, and they do not call it. The storms do not strike at random.

  “But in my youth—” His voice was soft “—they did. Not when I was a child—and yes, we were all children once, even the Dragons. Then? We were the new gods.”

  Tiamaris’s eyes rounded very, very subtly. He was surprised. Sanabalis, on the other hand, could have been carved out of rock.

  “We built, Kaylin. We built cities such as you could not imagine, aeries that make the palace itself look tiny and cramped and unimposing. We had art—it was not your art, but it was ours—and magic, and we ruled from the skies.”

  She was certain the Barrani had something to say about that, but kept this to herself.

  “But, as so many do who acquire power and the learning to wield it with greater and greater ease, we flew where we should not have flown, and we tried to acquire what we could not, in safety, hold.

  “And then,” he said softly, “the storms came.”

  Tiamaris was watching the Arkon’s back as if the Arkon were the only thing in the room.

  “You have, I’m informed, been told why Elantra stands where it stands. You understand the import of the High Halls, and understand why the war, at last, was laid to rest here.”

  She nodded. And hesitated. He marked the hesitation.

  “I was told,” she finally said, keeping her voice even, and more important, keeping accusation out of it, “that the City existed before that. That the heart of the fiefs was once a center of knowledge, a—a normal place.”

  “It was never,” he said softly, “normal. Never that.” He glanced at Tiamaris and Sanabalis. His eyes were lidded; the opacity of the lower membranes was almost nonexistent. “But for a time, it was a haven.” He glanced out the window again, and this time she knew his gaze went, not to the Halls, but beyond it.

  “We did not understand the nature of those storms at first,” he said, speaking to the glass. “When the first storm struck, we did not see it as shadow. We did not understand its nature. It was not dark, not the way you perceive darkness. It was wild. It was the essence of chaos, unleashed.” He lifted his head a moment, and she wondered if he saw this sky, or a different one.

  “We did not understand why it came, and it had no immediately discernable pattern. I remember,” he said, his voice deepening. “I remember flying over the plains while the storm raged.”

  Tiamaris drew a sharp breath, but didn’t speak. Kaylin didn’t, either.

  “There were no cities there,” he continued. “No aeries. Nothing but tall grass, and the animals that hunted or fed there. They knew,” he added. “They startled, and they fled, as if from fire.

  “The storm reached some who could not flee, and it changed them. It was a subtle change,” he added, “but the effect was startling. Even the grass itself was slowly transformed in the wild rain. It was—beautiful, in a fashion. The animals, even changed, were not a threat to us. Nor was the grass, although it was not entirely grass as we understood or knew it. And there were flowers and trees that bloomed there, after, that were entirely new. They could not be classified, and they could not—easily—be destroyed. They were unique.

  “There was magic, in the transformation,” he said. “It was a magic that could inspire awe, even in Dragons.
I was young, then.

  “What we did not understand, until the first storm in an aerie, was what the storms meant.”

  She didn’t, either. She opened her mouth to ask, and closed it again, remembering her training. Sometimes it was better to let them talk. Whoever they were.

  “But they came, and when they came to the aerie, we learned. It was bitter,” he added softly, “and many, many were the young who were lost to us, then. I was not among them. The eggs,” he added, and this time, she saw the momentary twist of his lips reflected in the surface of glass, “we had to destroy.

  “But the aerie itself was changed. Some changes were subtle. The hall of mirrors seemed unmarred, until one glanced at one’s reflection. Some changes were not; the hatchery was not.” His silence was longer. She wondered if he would break it.

  “Some of our oldest and most powerful were sent to the hatchery to guard the eggs.”

  Tiamaris lifted his head.

  “When they emerged from the hatchery, they were no longer, in any sense, Dragons. What they were,” he added, “was not even a shadow, not a mimicry. They were entirely and utterly changed. They could fly, yes, and they could still breathe the heart of flame. They could speak its name as if it were their own.

  “But they recognized none of us as kin. In form,” he added, “they were like stone, but moving and gleaming, as if they had been reborn, and their forms were sharpened or…worse. It was not a pleasant birth.” He shook his head. “They could not be unmade. But what knows life, knows change, and they were changed.”

  “The names?” she asked.

  “Yes, but that we knew almost immediately. They were few,” he continued, “or we would have perished. After we gathered, after the hatchery was destroyed, we returned to the plains and to the sites of other storms, and we studied what we could. What we discovered,” he added, “was that the subtle changes in the base animals were magnified—greatly—in Dragons.”

  “Animals have no names.”

  He nodded. “Do you understand?”

  She wanted to say no. Instead, she said, “The storms exist at the heart of the fiefs.”

  “Yes. Only there.”