Michelle Sagara - Cast In Shadow

The streets on the wrong side of the river would still be wide enough for wagons for blocks yet, but the traffic was thinner. In the day, the outer edges of the fiefs seemed like any other part of the city. If you stayed there, you’d probably be safe; patrols passed by, a stone’s throw from safety.

“Did that crystal of yours tell us where the hell we’re going?” Severn asked her.

“Which hell?” Actually, all things considered, it was an almost appropriate question. “Yeah,” she said. “Brecht’s old place.”

“Brecht? He’s still alive?”

“Apparently.” She shrugged. “Might even be sober.”

Severn snorted. And shrugged. His hands, however, stayed inches away from his long knife. One of these days—say, when one of the hells froze over—she’d ask if she could take a look at it. From the brief glimpse she’d had, it was good work. “So much for dangerous. Why Brecht?”

“He found the second body.”

Severn winced. “He’s not sober,” he said.

An hour had passed.

They’d wandered from the outer edges of the fief into the heart of Nightshade, which had the distinction of being the closest of the fiefs to the high city’s clean, lawful streets. Because of its tentative geography, it also had the distinction of having more of an obvious armed force than the fiefs tended to put on display.

Kaylin and Severn knew how to avoid those patrols. Even after seven years, it came as second nature.

Tiamaris was grim and quiet, and he followed where they led—usually into the shadowed lee of an alley, or the overhang of a rickety stall—when one of these patrols walked by.

And patrol? It was entirely the wrong word. It reeked of discipline and order, and in Nightshade, they were almost swear words. They certainly weren’t accurate.

“Why exactly are we hiding?” Tiamaris asked, the seventh time they rounded a sudden corner and retreated quickly.

They looked at each other almost guiltily, and then looked at Tiamaris. Severn’s laconic shrug was both of their answers.

“You’re a Dragon?” Kaylin said, hazarding a guess that was a pretty piss-poor excuse. She knew that maybe one in a hundred of the petty fief thugs would recognize a Dragon for what he was, and he’d probably do it a few seconds before he died. Or after; in the fiefs some people were so stupid they didn’t know when they were dead.

Tiamaris raised a dark brow; his eyes were golden. He didn’t feel threatened here. And because he didn’t, he probably wouldn’t be. That was they way it worked.

“Fine,” she said. She unbent from her silent crouch and looked askance at Severn. His lazy smile spread across his face, whitening the scar just above his chin. It was the last scar she’d seen him take, and it had been bleeding, then.

“I should probably tell you both,” she added, keeping apology out of her voice with effort, “that the Hawklord has strictly forbidden all unnecessary death in the fiefs while we’re investigating.”

“Define unnecessary.” Severn’s face was a mask. Wolf’s mask. She could well believe he’d found a home in the Shadow Wolves. The Shadows—Hawk, Wolf and Sword—usually said goodbye to their members in a time-honored way: they buried the bodies someplace where no one would find them. She couldn’t understand why he’d left them. Or why they’d let him go.

Didn’t, if she were truthful, want to.

She shrugged. “Ask the Hawklord. It was his command.”

“Interesting,” Tiamaris said quietly.

“Interesting how?”

“Rule of law in the fiefs is defined by the fiefs. Even the Lords of Law accede that this is the truth.”

She shrugged.

His frown tightened. “Are you always impulsive?”

She shrugged again. “I’m always late, if that helps.” And then, because his condescending tone annoyed her, she added, “You think he doesn’t want to annoy the fieflord.”

“I think he feels it imperative that we don’t.”

“And that implies that we’re here with the fieflord’s permission.”

“Not, legally, a permission that is his to grant, but yes, that is what I think.”

She turned the words over, thinking them through. After a moment, she glanced at Severn. He nodded. “I’m thinking,” she said slowly, “that I really don’t like this.”

Severn smiled. “I’m thinking that it’s time for a bet.”

“You haven’t changed either,” she said. The smile that crept over her face was a treacherous smile. She couldn’t—quite—douse it. Think, she told herself grimly. But thought led to the past, and the past—it led to darker places than she could afford to go today.

She pulled back. “What bet?”

“Well,” he said, nodding to the east, “there are four armed men coming this way.”

She nodded.

“And we’re not ducking.”

Nodded again.

“They’ll probably take it as a challenge.”

Three times, lucky. “And so?”

“So we’ll probably have to fight.”

Tiamaris said, in his crisp, bored Barrani, “I think that unlikely.”

“Don’t interfere, and we will.”

“And what will that prove?” Kaylin asked, ignoring Tia-maris.

“Nothing.”

“And the bet?”

“We fight.”

“Some bet.”

“And whoever pulls a real weapon first—you or me—loses.”

“What’s the debt?”

“I win, you let me explain.”

“No.”

“Then don’t lose, Kaylin. Here they come.” His smile was a thin stretch of lip over teeth. It made her feel every one of the five years that had always separated them.

“Fine.”

Tiamaris rolled his eyes. “You are children,” he said, just shy of open contempt. The words were Barrani—she wondered if the Dragon condescended to speak any other language when dealing with mere mortals—but the tone wasn’t. Quite. He folded arms across his broad chest and leaned back against the faded wood and brick of an old building.

The men closed in. They were armed; they carried naked blades. One sword, she thought, a short one, and three knives that were as long as Severn’s weapon.

“Hey, hey,” one said. He was a tall man, and his face was knife-thin, his eyes dark. “You’re visitors, I see. You’ve probably forgotten to pay the toll.”

Severn said nothing.

“You pay us, we’ll let you pass.”

Kaylin added more nothing.

The man smiled. “You don’t pay, and we’ll double the tolls, and extract them from your purses. Oh, wait, you don’t seem to have them.” He shrugged. Without turning, he said something in mangled Barrani. Kaylin understood it and tensed.

But her hand didn’t fall to her daggers, her throwing knives or her small club. Instead, she widened her stance and waited, watching them carefully. They wore some armor; it was piecework, and it wasn’t very good. But they weren’t slugs; they moved.

Two to one odds gave them some confidence; it was clear that Tiamaris had no intention of interfering, and he became just another part of the landscape. In the fiefs, this was not uncommon. In fact, given it was the fiefs, there were probably people up windowside, in the relative safety of their tiny homes, crouching and making bets with their roommates. Betting was the pastime of choice in the fiefs, especially when it involved someone else’s messy death.

“How well did they train you, in the Wolves?” Kaylin asked.

“Watch and see.”

“Like hell.”

He laughed.

She might have added something, but there was no more time for words.

She should have let Severn take the leader, because they were both the same height, and the advantage of height was not her friend. There was an advantage in lack of height, but it usually involved doing one’s best to look harmless and pathetic, and she’d given up that route when she’d left the fiefs to find the Hawklord.