Cast In Shadow

Magic trickled up her hand like a painful, frosty flicker. She hated it, and gritted her teeth as it passed through her skin. Of all the things she had had to learn to accept with grace, this was the hardest: to leave her palm there while magic roved and quested, seeking answers.

It was apparently satisfied; the doors began to swing open.

They opened into a round, domed room: the height of the Tower, and the face it showed to all but the most trusted of the Hawklord’s advisors. Given what she knew about the Hawklord, that that number was higher than zero should have come as a big surprise.

She bowed before the doors had fully opened. Because she wore the uniform of a Hawk, a bow was required. Had she worn any other uniform, she’d probably have had to throw in a long grovel as well as a bit of scraping.

“Kaylin Neya,” the Hawklord said coldly.

She rose instantly.

Met his eyes. They were like gray stone, like the walls of the round room; they gave no impression of life, and they hinted at nothing but surface. His face, pale as ivory, heightened their unusual color; his hair, gray, fell beyond his back. He was not Barrani, but he might as well have been; he was tall, proud and very cold.

But his wings crested the rise of drawn hood, and they were white, their pinions folded. Hawklord. It was not because he was Aerian that he was Lord here.

“Hawklord,” she said.

His face grew more stonelike.

“Lord Grammayre,” she added.

“I have been waiting for half of a day, Kaylin. Would you care to offer an explanation for the waste of my time to the Emperor?”

Her shoulders fell about four inches, but she managed to keep her head up. “No, sir.”

He frowned, and then turned toward the distant curve of the shadowed room. In it, she saw a small well of light. And around that light, a man.

Some instinct made her reach for her daggers; they were utterly silent as they slid out of their sheaths. That had been a costly gift from a mage on Elani Street who’d had a little bit of difficulty with a loan shark.

“I have, however, no intention of embarrassing the Hawks by allowing you to speak on their behalf. I have a mission for you,” he added, “and because of its nature, I wish you to take backup.”

Great. She looked down at her boots, and the low edges of the one pair of pants she now owned that wasn’t warzone material. “Lord Grammayre—”

“That was not, of course, a request.” He held out a hand in command, but not to her. “I would like to introduce you to one of your partners. You may recognize him; you may not. He has been seconded from the Wolves. Severn?”

She almost didn’t hear the words; they made no sense.

Because across the round room—a room that now seemed to have no ceiling, her vision had grown so focused—a man stepped into the sun’s light.

A man she recognized, although she hadn’t seen him for years. For seven years.

In utter silence, she threw the first dagger, and hit the ground running.

He wasfast.

But he’d always been fast. His own long knife was in the air before she’d run half the distance that separated them; her thrown dagger glanced off it with a sonorous clang. Everything in the Hawk’s tower reverberated; there could be no hidden fights, here.

“Hello,Kaylin.”

She snarled. Words were lost; what remained was motion, movement, intent. She held the second dagger in her hand as she unsheathed the third; heard the Hawklord’s cold command at her back as if it were simple breeze in the open streets.

The open streets of the fiefs, almost a decade past.

His smile exposed teeth, the narrowing of eyes, the sudden tensing of shoulder and chest as he gathered motion, hoarding it.

Left hand out, she loosed a second dagger, and he parried it, but only barely. The third, she had at his chest before he could bring his knife down.

Too easy, she thought desperately. Too damn easy.

She looked up at his lazy smile and brought her dagger in.

Light blinded her. Light, it seemed, from the sound of his sudden curse, blinded him; they were driven apart by the invisible hands of the Hawklord’s power, and they were held fast, their feet inches above the ground.

Her eyes grew accustomed, by slow degree, to the darkness of the domed room.

“I see,” the Hawklord said quietly, “that you know Severn. Severn, you failed to mention this in your interview.”

Severn had always recovered quickly. “I didn’t recognize the name,” he said, voice even, smile still draped across his face. He moved slowly, very slowly, and sheathed his long knife, waiting.

And she looked up at his face. He wasn’t as tall as Tanner, and he wasn’t as broad; he had the catlike grace of a young Leontine, and his hair was a burnished copper, something that reddened in caught light. But his eyes were the blue she remembered, cold blue, and if he had new scars—and he did—they hadn’t changed his face enough to remove it from her memory.

“Kaylin?”

She said nothing for a long, long time. And given the tone of the Hawklord’s voice, it wasn’t a wise expenditure of that time.

“I know him,” she said at last.

“That has already been established.” The Hawk’s lips turned up in a cold smile. “You seldom attempt to kill a man for no reason in this tower. But not,” he added, “never.”

She ignored the comment. “He’s no Wolf,” she told the man who ruled the Hawks in all their guises. “I don’t care what he told you—he doesn’t serve the Wolflord.”

He chose to ignore her use of the Lord of Wolves, her more colloquial title. “Ah. And who does he serve, Kaylin?”

“One of the seven,” she said, spitting to the side.

“The seven?”

She was dead tired of his word games. “The fieflords,” she said.

“Ah. Severn?”

“I was a Wolf,” he replied, as if this bored him. As if everything did. He ran a hand through his hair; it was just shy of regulation length. “I served the Lord of Wolves.” Each word emphasized and correct.

“You’re lying.”

“Ask the Lord of Hawks,” he told her, with a shrug. “He’s got the paperwork.”

“No,” the Hawklord replied quietly, “I don’t.”