Cast In Courtlight

“Yes,” Teela said, her grip on her weapon tightening. “She bears the mark of the outcaste. Even so, you will not challenge me.”

There was silence. A lot of it. And stillness. But it was the stillness of the hunter in the long grass of the plains.

Kaylin started to move, and Severn caught her arm in a bruising grip. He had not moved anything but his hand. But she met his eyes, and if human eyes didn’t change color, if they didn’t darken or brighten at the whim of mood, they still told the whole of a story if you knew the language.

Seven years of absence had never deprived her of what was almost her mother tongue. She froze, now part of him, and then turned only her face to observe Teela.

The Barrani Hawk was waiting.

Kaylin couldn’t see her feet, and wanted to. She’d learned, over the years, that Teela adopted different stances for different situations, and you could tell by how she placed her feet what she expected the outcome to be.

But you couldn’t hear it; she was Barrani, and almost silent in her movements. She looked oddly like Severn—waiting, watchful. She did not tense, and the only hint of threat was in the color of her eyes.

But it was mirrored in the eyes of these four.

Hers, she’d called them. Kaylin had to wonder if Teela’s grasp on the subtleties of Elantran had slipped.

The room was a tableau. Even breathing seemed to be held in abeyance. Minutes passed.

And then Teela turned her head to nod at Kaylin.

One of the four men moved. His sword was a flash of blue light that made no sound. He was fast.

Teela was faster. She lowered the pike as he lunged, and raised it, clipping the underside of his ribs. Left ribs, center. The pike punctured armor, and blood replied, streaming down the haft of the weapon—and down the lips of the guard.

Almost casually, the wide skirts no restriction, Teela kicked the man in the chest, tugging the pike free. Her gaze was bright as it touched the faces of the three guards who had not moved, neither to attack nor defend.

The Barrani who had dared to attack fell to his knees, and then, overbalanced, backward to the ground. Teela stepped over him and brought the wooden butt of the pike down before Kaylin could think of moving.

“Kyuthe,” Teela said. “Attend your patient.”

Kaylin was frozen. Severn was not. He guided her, his arm around her shoulders; even had she wanted to remain where she was, she wouldn’t have been able to. There was something about the warmth of his shoulder, the brief tightening of his hand, the scent of him, that reminded her of motion. And life.

She had seen Barrani in the drill halls before. She had seen them in the Courtyards. She had seen them on the beat, and she had even seen them close with thugs intent on misconstruing the intent of the Law. But she had never truly seen them fight.

Teela wasn’t sweating. She didn’t smile. She did not, in fact, look down. She had spoken in the only way that mattered here. And the three that were standing at a proud sort of attention had heard her clearly. They showed no fear; they showed no concern. The blood on the floor might as well have been marble. Or carpet.

Kaylin tried not to step in it.

She tried not to look at the Barrani whose throat had so neatly been staved in.

“Do not waste pity,” Teela told her in a regal, High Caste voice. “There is little enough of it in the High Court, and it is not accorded respect.”

Severn whispered her name. Her old name.

She looked up at him, and he seemed—for just an instant—so much taller, so much more certain, than she could ever hope to be. But his expression was grave. He reached out, when she couldn’t, and he pulled the curtains aside.

There was a Barrani man in the bed.

His eyes were closed, and his arms were folded across his chest in the kind of repose you saw in a coffin. He was pale—but the Barrani always were—and still. His hair, like his arms, had been artfully and pleasantly arranged. There were flowers around his head, and in the cup of his slack hands.

“Who is he?” she asked, forgetting herself. Speaking Elantran.

“He is,” Teela replied, her voice remote, her words Barrani, “the youngest son of the Lord of the High Court.”

Kaylin reached out to touch him; her hands fell short of his face. It seemed … wrong, somehow. To disturb him. “What is he called?” she asked, stalling for time. Teela did not reply.

Warning, in that. She reached out again, and again her hands fell short. But this time, the sense of wrongness was sharper. Harsher. Kaylin frowned. Her fingers were tingling in a way that reminded her of … the Hawklord’s door.

Magic.

She gritted teeth. Tensed. All of her movements were clumsy and exaggerated in her own sight.

But they were hers. “There’s magic here,” she said quietly. Teela, again, said nothing.

Kaylin opened her palms, forced them to rest above the only exposed skin she could touch: his face, his perfect face. Now magic crawled through her skin, ran up her arms, burning sharply.

If I explode, she thought sourly, I hope I kill someone. She wasn’t feeling particular.

She forced her hands down, and down again, as if she were reaching from a height. She would have fallen, but Severn was there, steadying her. She whispered his name, or thought she did. She could feel her lips move, but could hear no sound.

No sound at all save the crackle of magic, the fire of it. She kept pushing; it was an effort. Like bench-pressing weight, but backward. Holding on to that because she was stubborn, she continued.

Severn’s arm was around her; she could feel it. She could no longer feel her feet, and even her legs, which were almost shaking with exhaustion, seemed numb. She whispered his name again. It was as close to prayer as she came.

Hawk, she thought. And Hawk she was.

She plummeted as her hands, at last, made contact.

Kaylin had never tended Barrani before. Oh, she’d helped with the occasional scratch they managed to take—where help meant Moran’s unguents and barbed commentary—but she had never healed them. The Barrani did not go to Elantran midwives. Leontines did; Aerians did; even the Tha’alani had been known to call upon their services.

They were all mortal.

The Barrani were not, and they really liked to rub people’s noses in the fact.

Nor had Kaylin tended their young, their orphans. The only orphans in the foundling hall were human.

She had once offered to help a Dragon, and she had been curtly—and completely—refused. She understood why, now.

“He’s alive,” she managed to say. More than that would have been a struggle. Because alive in this case meant something different than it had every other time she offered this assurance to onlookers, many often insensate with fear and the burden of slender hope.

His skin felt like skin. And it felt like bark. It felt like moss, and fur, and the soft silk of Barrani hair; it felt like petals, like chiton, like nothing—and everything—that she had ever touched before. And there was more, but she hadn’t the words for it.

She almost pulled back, but Severn was there, and he steadied her. She could feel his hair brush the back of her neck, and realized her head was bent. Her eyes were closed.

The room was invaded by scent: rose and lilac, honey, water new with spring green; sweat, the aroma of tea—tea?—and sweet wine, the smell of green. The green. Behind her eyes she could sense the bowers of ancient forest, could almost hear the rustle of great leaves.

But here, too, she found silence. The silence of the smug, the arrogant, the pretentious; the silence of concern, of compassion; the silence of grief too great for simple words; the silence that follows a child’s first cry. She found so many silences, she wondered what the use of language was; words seemed impoverished and lessened.