Cast In Secret

Ceding that bickering to the racial courts, rather than the Imperial Courts, took more paperwork. But the Emperor was short on time and very, very short on patience, so only cases of real import—or those that involved the Elantran nobility—ever went to him directly. Given that he was Immortal, being a dragon and all, this struck Kaylin as unfair. After all, he had forever.

“Lord Kaylin,” Marcus said, as they approached his desk. The title, granted her by the Lord of the Barrani High Court, caused a round of snickers and an unfortunate echo in the office that set Kaylin’s teeth on edge. The deep sarcasm that only a Leontine throat could produce didn’t help much. “So good of you to join us.”

She snapped him a salute—which, given his rank didn’t demand it, was only meant to annoy—and stood at attention in front of his desk. Severn’s short sigh, she ignored; he offered Marcus neither of these gestures.

“There’s been a slight change in your beat today.”

The official roster changed at the blink of an eye. A Leontine eye, with its golden iris. “You’re to go to Elani Street,” he told them.

“What, mage central?”

“Or Charlatan central, if you prefer,” Marcus snapped back. Elani Street was both. There was the real stuff, if you weren’t naive and you knew what to look for, and then there was love potion number nine, and tell your fortune, and meet the right mate, all of which booths—usually with much finer names—saw a steady stream of traffic, day in and day out.

Kaylin was always torn between contempt for the people who had such blind dreams and contempt for the people who could exploit them so callously. Elani Street was not her favorite street, mostly because she couldn’t decide which of the two she wanted to strangle more.

She flipped an invisible coin. It landed, after a moment in the mental ether, on the side of people who made money, rather than people who lost it.

“Who’s fleecing people this time?” Kaylin muttered. “It’s only two days past Festival—you’d think people would be tired enough to give it a rest. Or,” she added darkly, “in jail.”

“Many are both,” Marcus replied, and something in his tone made her give up her sullen and almost perfect stance to lean slightly into the desk. Slightly was safe; he still hadn’t cleared half the paperwork the Festival produced annually, and knocking any of the less than meticulous piles over was—well, the furrows in the desk didn’t get there by magic.

“What’s happened?”

“There’s been a disturbance,” he replied. “I believe you know the shop. Evanton’s. You may have given him some business over the years.”

She knew the shop; she had had her knives enchanted there so that they left their sheaths without a sound. Teela had been the Hawk who had both introduced her to Evanton and also made clear to Evanton that anything he offered for money had better damn well work. Given that Teela was one of a dozen or so Barrani—also all Hawks—who had made their pledge of allegiance to the Imperial Halls of Law, her word tended to carry weight. After all, she was, like the dragon Emperor and the rest of her kind, immortal—and the Barrani loved nothing better than a grudge, at least judging by the way they held on to the damn things so tightly. Startlingly beautiful to the eye, they were cold as crackling ice to the ear, and their tall, slender bodies radiated that I-can-kill-you-before-you-can-blink confidence that was, in fact, no act.

Evanton, to his credit, had been neither offended nor frightened. In fact, his first words had been, “Yes, yes, I know the drill, Officer.” And his second: “You’re on the young side for a Hawk. So take my advice, for what it’s worth. You should pay more attention to the company you keep. People will judge you by it, mark my words.”

He generally had a lot of words he wanted marked.

Which had caused Teela to grimace. And Tain, her beat partner, to laugh.

As for the enchantment, he’d approved of it. “Most people who come here want something to make them look prettier,” he’d said, with obvious contempt. “Or younger. Or smarter. This, this is practical.”

She had never asked Evanton if he had ever belonged to the Imperial Order of Mages; there wasn’t much point. If he had, he’d managed to get out the unusual way—he wasn’t in a coffin. Although to Kaylin’s youthful eye, he looked as if he should have been. His hair was the color of blinding light off still water, and his skin was like wrinkled leather; he was almost skeletal, and his work—or so he said—demanded so much attention he was continuously bent over in a stoop. She had been certain, the first time she saw him, that he would break if she forced him to straighten up.

But still … she liked him. So she frowned. “What kind of a disturbance?”

“That, I think, is what you’re there to ascertain.” He paused. “Are you waiting for something?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Get lost.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Corporal?”

Severn nodded.

“Make sure that she understands that ‘get lost’ in this case isn’t literal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What I want to know,” Private Kaylin Neya said, not quite stomping her feet as she marched down the streets, “is why no one calls you Lord Severn.”

The corporal—which rank still annoyed Kaylin, and yes, she knew it was petty—shrugged. “Because it doesn’t bother me,” he replied.

“It didn’t bother me when the Barrani called me Lord Kaylin,” she said sourly.

He laughed. He kept an easy pace with her march, given the difference in the length of their strides, and her mood—which could charitably be described as not very good—seemed to cheer him immensely.

“What’s so funny?”

“It bothered you enough to cause you to point out that no one called Teela Lord.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “It wasn’t the Barrani,” she insisted. “But when Marcus started—”

“The entire office, you mean?”

“The entire office follows Marcus’s lead, except when he’s chewing through his desk.” Which was only partly a figurative description of an angry Leontine officer. Leontine fur, when it stood on end, was impressive; Leontine jaws, massive, boasted teeth that were easily capable of rendering most throats not quite useful for things like breathing—but most of the danger they could offer came from their massive, and usually sheathed, claws.

Marcus’s desk was a testament to how often he lost his temper.

“If you give it a few days,” Severn told her, “it’ll pass.”

She snorted. “Sanabalis started it.”

“Lord Sanabalis.”

“That’s not what I call him.”

“It is, however, what everyone else calls him, and what you’d like to call him at the moment would be … ill advised. You’re his student, he has graciously agreed to continue to tutor you, and you both know that your career depends on whether or not he decides to actually pass you.” He didn’t add that in this case career and life were the same thing. He didn’t need to. Kaylin had a magic that not even the most august of the Imperial scholars understood, and if it had been a weak magic, it wouldn’t have mattered—much. But it was strong enough to withstand the full breath of a dragon in his true form. Strong enough to make a hole in a thick stone wall that was wider across than Severn. Strong enough to heal the dying.

And the Emperor was in possession of all these facts, and more. Kaylin’s glance strayed a moment to her arms; the length of her sleeves all but hid the dark marks that were tattooed there, in whirls and strokes, as if she were parchment, and they were the scattered telling of a story that was ancient before history began.

Her powers and these marks had arrived almost at the same time, in the winter world of the fiefs, where only the desperate and the criminals lived. Funny, that the fiefs should lie so precisely at the heart of the city.

“Kaylin.”

She looked up, and realized that Severn had been speaking. Dragged her eyes from sleeves that weren’t all that interesting, anyway, and nodded.

“Lord Sanabalis might be unusual for a Dragon, but he is a Dragon.” He paused a moment, and as Kaylin realized she was losing him and pulled up short, he added, “He meant it as a gesture of respect, Kaylin.”

“I don’t need that kind of respect. And anyway, no one else means it that way.”

“Well, no. But they’re Hawks. You expected different?”