Michelle Sagara - Cast in Silence

Tiamaris was waiting for her when she reached the office. He was seated primly in one of Marcus’s chairs. Marcus was seated, far less primly, across from him, his increasingly untidy desk the bastion between them. The Hawks’ Sergeant was never going to be friendly to Tiamaris. Tiamaris, himself not Mr. Personality, seemed to take this in stride.

Kaylin understood why Marcus was so frosty; Tiamaris had voted, in Court Council, to have her killed outright. But that had been years ago, and it had occurred well before Tiamaris had actually met her; if she was willing to let bygones be bygones, Marcus should be able to do the same. She was not, however, foolhardy enough to tell Marcus this. Not today.

She approached his desk as if she were a timid tax collector who had the misfortune to leave her burly guards outside. He glanced at her as if she were the same thing. “Reporting for duty,” she told him.

He grimaced, gritted his teeth, and waited for the window’s mellifluous hourly phrase. She could hear his claws grinding desktop as the window told the office what the hour was, and demanded that they be polite, friendly, and collegial at the start of this busy, busy day.

Tiamaris raised a dark brow. “That,” he told them both, “could be irritating.”

“Enraging,” Kaylin replied quietly.

“I assume it’s magically protected?”

She nodded.

He shook his head. “You must have angered someone, Private Neya.”

“It’s a long list.”

“Don’t,” Marcus told her curtly, “add me to it, Private.”

She stood at attention.

“Given what happened the last time you went into the fiefs,” he told her grimly, “I am on record as opposing this investigation.”

“Sir.”

He said nothing for a long moment. Then he stood, scraping his chair across the floorboards loudly enough to break most conversations. “Your partner for the duration of this investigation will be Lord Tiamaris of the Dragon Court.” She nodded.

“You will investigate the borders of Nightshade, with special attention to the interior.” He was in a mood. His Elantran was strained enough that his words had a distinctly—and angrily—Leontine cast to them. “If anything is out of the ordinary—” he also spit this word out in outrage “—you are to take note and report it immediately. The report will come to this office.”

“Sir.”

“Dismissed.”

She glanced at Tiamaris, who hadn’t moved.

On cue, Marcus looked at him. “Off the record,” he told the Dragon Lord, although it was highly unlikely to remain that way, “I will hold you personally responsible if Private Neya is returned to the infirmary on a stretcher again. I understand the concerns of the Dragon Caste Court, but whatever else she might be, she is not a Dragon, and the Caste Court’s laws and concerns, unless specifically made public, are not the concerns of the Halls of Law. Do I make myself clear?”

“As clear as good glass,” Tiamaris replied. He did rise, then.

Severn was waiting by the office doors. He held out one hand as she passed him, and she frowned.

“What?”

“Bracer,” he said quietly.

She glanced at her wrist, and shook her head. “If I remove it here,” she told him quietly, “Marcus will rip out someone’s throat. Or try. It always comes back to you; if I need to remove it, I’ll remove it by the Ablayne and toss it in.” The bracer was not an optional piece of equipment; it was mandatory. It confined Kaylin’s magic. She even did most of her lessons with Sanabalis wearing it, although when he was frustrated, he had her remove it and lay it on the table beside the offending, and unlit, candle.

Severn laughed, then. It was one of Kaylin’s favorite things to do with the bracer, when she was in a mood. Because it was ancient and because no one understood how it functioned—or at least that was the official story—no one knew why it chose a Keeper; it had chosen, not Kaylin, but Severn. When she tossed it in the river, it appeared—sometimes dripping—in Severn’s home. He told her it was making the carpets moldy.

“I don’t think we’re going to run into any trouble. Not in Nightshade.”

He said nothing, and she lifted her hand to the mark on her cheek. He glanced away, then turned and caught her wrist. “Stay in Nightshade, Kaylin.”

The only way she now lied to Severn was by omission. She said nothing until he let her wrist go. But when he did, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be careful,” she told him. “Please don’t threaten Tiamaris.”

He raised a brow.

“Oh, please, do if it will amuse you,” the slightly irritated Dragon Lord added. “I’m collecting threats today.” He paused. “But for the sake of variety, attempt to be either more dire—or more original—than one Dragon Lord, one Leontine, and one Aerian.”

Kaylin winced. “I’m not a child,” she told Tiamaris stiffly. “I don’t know why—”

“I do,” was his grim reply. “And while I would like to discuss the relative states of our respective maturity, I would like to do it from the safety of the other side of the Ablayne.”

“Safety?” Kaylin muttered as she lengthened her stride as far as it would go and still failed to match Tiamaris’s headlong walk.

“The Halls of Law have no purchase in the fiefs,” was his reply. “There, they only have an Outcaste Barrani, an Outcaste Dragon, and a handful of overly ambitious ferals.”

The sun had completely cleared the horizon when Tiamaris and Kaylin reached the bridge that crossed the Ablayne into Nightshade. Kaylin had never quite understood why the Emperor allowed the bridge, which was clearly in decent repair, to remain standing. While it was true that people did cross it, it was also true that some of those people went in the wrong direction, just as Kaylin and Tiamaris were now doing.

This was not the only bridge across the river, of course; it was not even the only bridge out of the fiefs that Kaylin had ever crossed. But it had defined many of her early dreams in the fief of Nightshade, and she always approached it as if it were a doorway between the present and the past. She did so now, but she was aware that Tiamaris, who had slowed enough to allow her forced jog to keep up, had had no such dreams.

“What are we looking for?” she asked Tiamaris.

He glanced at her, and then slowed to a walk, as if the weight of the bridge’s symbolism had finally reached his feet. “Borders,” he told her quietly. “I know that Evanton is known to you as something other than the Keeper, but his words—if you relayed them with any accuracy—are significant to the Eternal Emperor. They would be significant, as well, to any of the fieflords.”

“You want to talk to Nightshade.” She turned and after a pause, rested her elbows on the rails. Strands of dark hair curled gently around her cheeks as she bent over the river itself. It was never still; it reflected nothing.

He surprised her. “I want nothing from Nightshade, fief or Lord. I admit that I find the fieflord slightly…irritating. But he is not my Outcaste; he is Barrani.”

“You just don’t like his sword.”

One glance at Tiamaris told her that she’d failed to annoy him; his eyes were still a lambent gold. The lower membranes were, however, raised. “I don’t, as you quaintly put it, care for his sword, no. But he is Nightshade. And if the heart of the fiefs is contained at all, it is contained by the fiefs as they stand. What lies in Ravellon will not determine the shape—or strength—of Nightshade’s border while Lord Nightshade rules.

“And nothing you say, or do here, will change that fact. I am not here, nor was I sent here, to speak with Lord Nightshade.”

“Then what—”