Michelle Sagara - Cast in Flame

Bellusdeo glanced at Kaylin. Kaylin turned a tight-lipped stare on Teela, who shrugged. “Surely you expected this?” the Barrani Hawk asked. “You know he hasn’t lived in a mortal city before; he certainly hasn’t lived in this one.”

“The Leontines,” Kaylin told Mandoran, in chilly Barrani, “are not animals. Nor are the humans. The Aerians are not birds. This is a city, not a zoo—and none of its inhabitants are here to be stared at through cage bars.”

“Kitling.”

Mandoran chuckled. “My apologies, Lord Kaylin. I seem to have touched a sensitive spot.”

“You’ve reminded me of all the things I hate about Immortals. I don’t know if you’d consider that a sensitive point or not.” She didn’t much care, either. The small dragon lifted a head and squawked. When Kaylin, still tight-lipped, ignored him, he nipped her ear.

“What?” She turned to glare at him, and he avoided her by leaping off her shoulders to hover in the air. When she still failed to understand whatever it was he was trying to tell her, he added sounds to the flap of wings, and when she failed to get that, he flew, head first, toward a window. A storefront window.

Kaylin ran after him, arms outstretched, while people in the street stopped to stare. She hadn’t been patrolling on Elani for almost two months; the small dragon was still a novelty. Some of the gawkers were no doubt assigning a monetary value to him; she pitied anyone foolish enough to actually try to grab him and carry him off. Actually, scratch that. At the moment, she’d probably enjoy it.

It was only as she reached up for small and squawky that she recognized which window he’d threatened: it was Evanton’s.

The door, habitually shut, now swung open; a wizened, bent old man was standing on the other side of the frame, his frown bracketed by a decade’s worth of lines. “Don’t stand there gawking,” he said, matching tone of voice to expression. “Come in. I put tea on ten minutes ago.”

* * *

Evanton didn’t actually drink tea. He made it for guests. Given his current mood, those guests might as well have been tax collectors. Bellusdeo entered his store, her eyes rounding. If she’d been mortal, Kaylin would have assumed she was surprised at the clutter and the occasional moving cobweb. She wasn’t. She turned to Evanton, in his apron, his jeweler’s glass hanging on the edge of a tarnished silver chain, his white hair in wisps above the crown of his head.

And she bowed.

This seemed to mollify the old man. “You must be Bellusdeo,” he said. “Rise, Lady. While I have a home here, you will always be a welcome, and valued, guest.” His voice was deeper than usual, and to Kaylin’s ear, stronger; it rumbled as if he were almost a Dragon. “I do not know who named you, or from whence they took the name, but it is yours in its entirety. I am honored.”

Kaylin remembered, belatedly, to close her mouth. She stared at Bellusdeo. Bellusdeo’s eyes were a luminous gold, and her lips were turned up in a gentle, almost reverent smile. “You have the advantage of me in many ways,” she said.

“Ah, forgive me.” He turned a far less reverent gaze on Kaylin. “Private, introduce us.”

“Sorry. Bellusdeo, this is a friend of mine. He’s called Evanton, around these parts; if he has a family name, he’s never shared. The young man hiding in the kitchen is Grethan, his apprentice.”

Bellusdeo frowned.

“Kaylin is, like the rest of the inhabitants of Elantra, very informal,” Evanton said. He was, however, smiling in his slightly pained way.

“And you allow this?”

“Lady, she has twice saved my garden. In ignorance, she’s borne the responsibility that has been the entirety of my adult life. She has never demanded reward greater than tea and snacks—and if I am to be honest, she doesn’t so much demand as help herself if I am slow. I am willing to accept informality from her; formality would be so unnatural the awkwardness would likely kill one of us.”

“Kaylin, do you understand who Evanton is?” Bellusdeo demanded.

“Yes. He’s the Keeper.”

“And do you understand what that means?”

“He—he stops the elements from destroying each other. And incidentally the rest of us, although I don’t think they’d notice that as much.” She hesitated and then said, “How did you know what he is if you didn’t recognize who he is?”

Bellusdeo now turned to Teela. “Have you never explained?”

“Teela brought me here, the first time. When I wanted practical enchantments.”

Evanton winced.

“Practical?”

“My daggers don’t make a sound when I draw them.”

The Dragon looked scandalized.

Evanton looked even more pained. “We all, as Kaylin likes to say, need to eat.”

“I should have expected no better from an Empire that so denigrates the Chosen.” Bellusdeo’s eyes were now a deeper than comfortable orange.

“I am content, Lady,” Evanton said, voice grave. “If the current Empire does not treat me with the regard or respect you now offer, it is a far less lonely place than it once was. Grethan,” he added, his voice developing the gruffness and irritability of age. “You are being rude to a guest.”

Grethan’s stalks appeared from the left side of the door frame; they were followed, slowly, by the rest of his face. He didn’t look comfortable. He was Tha’alani by birth, but although he had the characteristic racial stalks protruding from his forehead, they were decorative. He couldn’t join the Tha’alaan. He couldn’t speak to his own people the way they spoke among each other unless one of them touched him and entered his thoughts. The deafness had, in the parlance of the Tha’alani, resulted in insanity. In normal human terms, he’d been angry and isolated, and that anger and isolation had almost caused the death of a Tha’alani child.

A child whose life Grethan had, in the end, saved.

Evanton had taken him in; Kaylin often wondered if what had seemed an act of forgiveness and mercy wasn’t just one long, extended punishment. But the only thing Grethan seemed to fear now was Evanton. He certainly wasn’t afraid of Kaylin, Teela or Bellusdeo.

“Grethan,” Kaylin said. “It’s good to see you’re still alive. Evanton seems to be in a bit of a mood today.”

Bellusdeo’s eyes almost popped out of her head. Kaylin made a mental note not to visit Evanton with Bellusdeo in tow.

The small dragon squawked and landed on Grethan’s shoulder. Grethan looked at least as surprised as Kaylin felt. She recovered first. Grethan seemed entranced.

“So why is Evanton so cranky today?”

“Unfair, Private,” Evanton replied. “Your tea is getting cold. And you’ve failed to introduce me to your other companion—although I suppose you could rightly attribute that lack of manners to Lord Teela.”

“If she were unwise,” Teela replied, her eyes an easy green. “Evanton, this is Mandoran. He has just returned to our lands after a long absence, and everything in them is new, except perhaps rudiments of our language. Mandoran, this is Evanton, the current Keeper.”

“Mandoran?” Evanton frowned. It was a very peculiar frown; his eyes narrowed. In the dim light of the storefront, they seemed momentarily blue, although Evanton’s didn’t, as a general rule, change color. He extended a hand. Mandoran hesitated before extending one of his own. “Come, join us. Grethan, if you can detach yourself from Kaylin’s companion, I would ask that you move refreshments to the Garden.”

Grethan’s eyes widened.

“The kitchen, while suitable for a private of the Hawks, is nowhere near suitable for Lady Bellusdeo.” The official title was Lord, but Kaylin didn’t bother to correct him. “We will therefore repair to the Garden.”