But when she’d finally arrived at her destination—a small inn, owned by a man to whom she’d given a letter and received keys for a room and no questions—she had made her way to the Halls of Law. There, for the first time, she had seen the Aerians in flight. She had seen them leave the ground; she had seen them land. She had seen their wings fold and open as they gained height or lost it rapidly.
The Hawklord is just a man with wings. Nothing special.
But he had to be, to command these. He had to be, to be one of them.
That had been her first mistake. She made up for the lost time by studying the Aerians and their flight patterns as they skirted the height of the Tower, and she marked the changes of their guard.
Barren had given her the climbing gear she would use on this mission. He had made clear she was not to lose it until the Hawklord was dead, after which she was to lose it immediately and in a place it was unlikely to be found. Which meant, Elianne thought, across the Ablayne. Maybe she’d drop it in Nightshade.
The night was cool, and the sky was cloudy; everything had gone to dark gray. She tried to find her anger, as she waited. She tried to find the bitter envy and resentment she felt for the people on the right side of the bridge, because the man beneath the aperture roof protected them, watched over them, and offered justice for the wrongs done them. Who had ever done that for the fief of Nightshade or the fief of Barren?
She had seen examples of Nightshade’s justice, hanging in public cages. She had experienced examples of Barren’s in private.
Anger eluded her, even so. She felt tired. Resigned. Her sheaths were strapped to her thighs; she had enough rope to guide her fall, and she wore open-fingered gloves on her palms so the rope didn’t burn on the way down.
Ready, she thought. I’m ready.
She took a breath, and as the Hawklord finally moved, she moved.
The height from the ceiling to the ground wasn’t insignificant; it didn’t have to be. The only people who used the roof as if it were a door had wings; height didn’t bother them. It didn’t bother Elianne, either. She dropped rope, and she dropped herself almost immediately after it, landing in a head over feet roll, knees bent into her chest so that she could unfold herself into a standing start.
He was already facing her when she stood, daggers out, her muscles gathered to leap. But he held no weapon, and he didn’t attempt to leap out of her way; his eyes were the color of sky that hasn’t quite faded into night.
“Why are you here?” he asked. His wings twitched slightly at his back, but he didn’t open them.
She wanted to say Why do you think I’m here? because she had daggers in either hand and she obviously hadn’t come up the stairs. But when she opened her mouth, the words that fell out were, “To kill you or die trying.”
He nodded, as if he’d expected no less—but he must have assumed she was a child, because he didn’t move. He waited, his eyes taking in both her face and the daggers in her hands; because he waited, she was frozen for a moment, watching not his face, but the folds of his wings. Alone among the Aerians she’d watched for days, he possessed white wings, angel wings, and they flexed slightly as he at last unfurled them.
“What have I done,” he asked calmly, “that I deserve death?”
Too many words crowded into her mouth then; she spit, because she had to to draw breath. What she should have said—that Barren had ordered it—wasn’t even in the running. The anger she couldn’t quite find when she had watched him in silence from above now broke through, and she found herself shouting, while her hands shook around dagger hilts, all the things that she could have hated him for.
He was impassive; he watched, he waited, and—without comment—he listened.
All the deaths. The deaths she hadn’t been able to prevent. The deaths she’d caused. All of the rage and the pain and the fury because someone should have cared, someone should have been there, and he sat hunched on the wrong damn side of the river, on the side of the river where he wasn’t needed. Her breath was ragged, and her sides heaved as if she’d just run across the whole of Barren, a feral pack on her heels.
She even mentioned the ferals, because the ferals didn’t hunt on this damn side of the Ablayne. She might, in her rage, have accused him of cooperating with the ferals—she couldn’t honestly remember. Her mouth had slipped entirely free of her conscious control, and it spouted words she would have died before she’d let slip anywhere else.
Or, given the nature of the words, directly after.
Only when her silence had lasted half a minute did he raise a hand, turning his palm toward her almost gently. “Are you done?” he asked quietly.
It was not the question she expected, and she felt the line of her shoulders slump, as if the strings that had been supporting them had unexpectedly been cut. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m done here.”
And she was. All the words. All the effort. All the months of killing for Barren, a man she both hated and feared—they were over. For a moment she couldn’t remember why she’d started, and when she did, her throat closed over the words. It was almost over. It would be good, to have an end.
Elianne found her legs again, and they not only held her up, but bent, tensing as she began to move, to circle, to seek the easy, quick opening. His wings extended fully, and she saw them arch slightly, as if he meant to push off, seeking the obvious advantage of height.
No, you don’t. Shifting dagger weight in one hand, she threw the knife at the stretch of the pinion. She was a good aim. But it missed. Somehow. She didn’t throw the other; instead she slid a hand down her thigh and rearmed herself. She wasn’t Morse; she still favored her right hand, but she could kill with her left.
If she was facing one of Barren’s thugs gone bad.
Facing this man was different. The anger had left with the words, and in its place was nothing; she was hollow, and she felt it as a lightness that was absent any joy. She found her pace, moving, almost dancing; she struck him once with the edge of her right blade, and left a shallow scratch that separated his robes.
He still hadn’t bothered to arm himself. Like Elianne, he was done with words; unlike Elianne, he hadn’t had to shed many of them to reach that state. Twice more, he let her close; there was no third time. Instead, he lifted both of his hands in a clap that sounded like thunder, and light flared in the Tower.
It was a bright light, but it suggested fluid, not air, and it swirled around her as if it had weight. That weight, untouchable but not untouching, folded itself around her limbs, locking them in place. She felt a moment’s smugness as she thought not a mage, Barren? Which was stupid, but last thoughts were like that. She couldn’t look down, but she could see, in the periphery of her vision, a ring of bright light around her, a circle in which she was enclosed.
The Hawklord folded both hands and wings as he watched her.
She waited in silence. She offered no further threat; the words would have been pathetic without the ability to move to back them up. Instead, she waited. As she did, her arms and her legs began to ache. She thought it was the magic itself, but realized, after a moment, that it was her skin. The marks were making themselves felt.
He frowned, as if he could feel it, as well—and for all she knew, he could. His hands did a complicated dance in the air, a deliberate series of gestures that flew by so fast she could get nothing else from them, and his frown deepened. Her left arm rose entirely of its own volition—or his—and he approached her cautiously, first removing the dagger from her frozen fingers and setting it, with care, against the stone floor.
Having done that, he now unbuttoned the wrist of her shirt, and folded it up, until it reached the faint bend of her outstretched arm. The marks on her arm lay exposed to his eyes, as if she were parchment; what they said to him, she didn’t know. To her, they were now a bright gray-blue, and they pulsed as if they were alive.
“Records,” he said. It was the first time she had heard the word spoken in that tone.
<
br /> The mirror at his back came to life, the way the light of this circle had, as if everything in the Tower responded to his command. But the images that flickered in the mirror were familiar to Elianne; they were marks.
Ah. Marks and bodies. Corpses. Children her own age, or not much younger. Faces she vaguely remembered. Faces she knew. None of them were her own. But he didn’t watch faces; he spoke again, and the images shifted until all that was in them were marks, like these, against pale, bloodless skin.
“So,” the Hawklord said. And then, after a pause, “Who sent you?”
It made no sense, and she was silent for a long moment.
“The answer,” he told her softly, “can be gained in two ways.”
She nodded; it was pretty much what she expected. But she didn’t particularly feel like being tortured solely to protect Barren. “Barren.”
He frowned. “Barren?” And then his eyes widened slightly. “You refer to the fief lord?”
She couldn’t shrug, although she wanted to. “Yes.”
“Why? I mean,” he added, watching her expression, “why did he send you?”
She tried shrugging anyway; nothing moved. “You’re causing grief at the crossing.”
“Grief?” Again, his frown; it was as if she were speaking a different language that he could understand only with effort.
“Your Hawks are patrolling the only bridge that crosses the Ablayne into Barren. It’s scaring people off.”
“A man died just before the foot of that bridge.”
“He died on the wrong side of the river for you. You don’t care about the fiefs, remember?” Her cheeks felt hot.
“It is not that we don’t care. What is your name?”
Elianne said, without pause, “Kaylin. Kaylin Neya.”
One white brow rose in a subtle arch, but he nodded. “Very well, Kaylin. It isn’t that we don’t care. Our jurisdiction in the fiefs is limited by the nature of the fiefs themselves.”
Of course. Of course it was. “You’re saying we deserve what we get there?”
“I will not speak for the others. You, however, appear to kill men at the behest of a crimelord. What would you now say you deserve?”
There it was. The truth of the words, the truth of his question. His eyes were ash-gray. She wasn’t certain what it meant. Barrani eyes shaded between green and blue, where blue meant death. Clearly the Aerians were different, and not just because of their wings.
“I deserve,” she told him, “whatever I get. There’s no justice, there’s no fairness. You can kill me. If you kill me,” she shrugged. Or tried. “I won’t be the first. And at least I had some chance.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her words, which was fine; it was the pain she begrudged him, but he got that, too.
“So you don’t believe in justice.”
She could spit, because she could talk. She did. This caused a ripple of distaste to mar his calm expression, and she was petty enough to find satisfaction in it. “Do you?” she asked, in as scathing a voice as she could find strength to use.
His smile was an odd smile; it was neither cruel nor smug. Instead, it seemed to reflect some of the pain she herself had revealed. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It is why I am the Lord of the Hawks.”
She snorted. “Barren’s the Lord of the Fief, and he sure as shit doesn’t.”
“No. But not all Lords rule for the sake of power.” He glanced at the mirror, in which marks were frozen so perfectly it might have been a framed painting. “We do not always succeed in our attempts to find—or uphold—justice. But if we fail to try at all, what is left? The only justice that exists is the justice we attempt to make. The only fairness, the same.
“But I consider it worth the attempt.” He turned to face her again. “Is this your attempt to find justice?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. I had to do this—all of this, this whole life—because I need to be strong enough to kill a man.”
“To kill a stranger?”
“No! To kill someone who—”
“Hurt you?”
She swallowed. Hurt her? Gods, yes. Nothing that had ever happened in her life had hurt her as much, not even the dim memory of her mother’s death, her inexplicable desertion. But she said, “No. Not me.” And she tried to turn her face away. Something held her fast—held her without bruising—and she fought it, biting the inside of her cheek until it bled. Some things, she didn’t share. Not with Morse. Not with this beautiful, terrifying stranger.
Not with anyone but Severn, and Severn—
Her arms and legs felt raw; she couldn’t move them and didn’t try. But she turned her face, by slow, agonizing inches, away from the Hawklord’s inspection.
“And will you find the choice you’ve made worth it, in the end?”
“How the hell should I know?” She should have shouted; she whispered the words instead, as if they were broken prayer. “It’s not the end yet.” But it was. She would not kill this man; she couldn’t. Barren had been wrong; he was a mage. He did have power. Kaylin understood what was done with power, when you had it. Maybe laws existed on this side of the river—but not for people like her.
Was it worth it?
No. No. Because her dead were still dead, and joining them, people who had done nothing at all to deserve it. Kaylin was never going to be strong enough to protect any of them. What had she become instead? Weak enough to lead the men who would kill them to where they were hidden, and safe. To Paul. To his mother, his sister, and Arna.
I didn’t kill them! I didn’t mean for them to die!
But it didn’t matter; they were dead. Who else would she kill just by walking past at the wrong time? Who else would she fail to defend because she was terrified and powerless? If she had even been home, would she have saved Steffi and Jade? Could she have?
Yes. Yes. She cried out in wordless fury. All of her words were trapped on the inside of her head.
Eli, you’re the worst liar I’ve ever met.
She felt something brush her cheek; not fingers, but the tips of wings. Startled, she turned to look at the Hawklord again; it was easier to move her head this time, although her body was still frozen in place.
“No,” he told her, as she met his gaze. “I do not mean to harm you. Even if I wanted to make you suffer, could I cause more suffering than you are causing yourself?” But his wings ceased their motion, as if he could tell that she found it unbearable. He stepped back.
Watching her, he raised his arms; the motion was swift, but somehow spare. Whatever was holding her in place suddenly vanished; she was standing in the center of a circle carved in the stone floor, and she watched as its light guttered. She had one dagger; the other, he had retrieved, and as she lowered her arm, her sleeve fell over the marks that had changed her life.
“What will you do now, Kaylin?” he asked quietly.
So, too, asked the apparition that now sat in a throne that had never existed in the Hawklord’s stone tower, its high back at odds with the fold of black Aerian wings, waiting and watching in a way that felt familiar. She spoke with the Hawklord’s voice, with the nuance that implied both curiosity and hope, but her eyes were now flat and shiny, as if they were made of perfect, polished stone.
Kaylin glanced around the room that was so much like—and so much unlike—the Hawklord’s tower. “You’re not the Hawklord,” she told the figure.
“No.” This was now spoken in Kaylin’s voice.
“You’re not me, either. Not even close to me.”
“I am close,” the figure replied, “to what you might become, should you desire it. The flesh of the Tower has not yet been shaped, and it is waiting.” Ebon wings unfolded, unhindered by throne. Or reality. “Have you not dreamed of flight all your life?”
Kaylin stared at the wings. And then she turned to look at Severn, who waited silently by one wall as if he understood all the memory, all the rage, and all the bitter sense of f
ailure that had dogged her steps since she’d crossed the bridge—both bridges. All bridges, really.
“I didn’t kill him,” she told the seated figure, although it was obvious.
“You couldn’t. You know that now. You might have understood it then, had you tried. You didn’t—and wouldn’t—think about it. Why?”
Kaylin laughed. It was a bitter, shaky laugh, but she had already decided that what the Tower wanted—or what it wanted from her—was honesty. “I didn’t think because I was thirteen years old, and a fool. I came here, or my version of here, to kill him and leave Barren’s message. Not more, not less.”
“You failed.”
Kaylin shrugged. “Story of my life.”
But the warped mirror-image was not satisfied. “Why?” it asked, and this time the walls and the floor of the Tower shook.
“Kaylin,” Lord Nightshade said, when the tremor had subsided, “might I suggest that you answer the question?”
Kaylin nodded. “Why did I fail?”
The not-quite Kaylin inclined her head, and her wings twitched; it was a disturbingly familiar gesture.
All of the excuses that she’d used until now failed her. They were just that: excuses. She faced herself, seeing shadows in the wings that were extended, and she said, “He was what I wanted. To serve. Or to be. He was—all of the Aerians were—like that little bit of dream that just won’t die, no matter how hard you try to kill it.
“And I didn’t want to kill it.”
“You came to kill.”
“Yes.”
The woman now rose. And smiled. “So,” she said, in a voice that was neither Kaylin’s nor the Hawklord’s. “You thought to die in its place, in this room. To fail, and to die.”
“I never had the courage to kill myself,” Kaylin replied. “I didn’t even have the courage to die fighting, not when it counted.” She thought of Paul. “I had enough courage to fail. I thought death at his hands would be clean. It was more than I deserved.”
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