Michelle Sagara - Cast In Secret

She came back to the eyes.

The girl whispered a single word.

Kaylin.

The first thing Kaylin had been taught when she’d been allowed to accompany groundhawks on her first investigation of a crime scene was Do not touch anything or we will never bring you back. This also meant, Do not embarrass us by attempting to steal anything. The Hawks were pretty matter-of-fact about her upbringing; they didn’t actually care. The fiefs couldn’t be actively policed, so it wasn’t as if anything she’d done there was on record. If she had been canny enough to survive life on the streets of Nightshade, tough enough to emerge unscathed, and idealistic enough to want to uphold the Law rather than slide through its grip, so much the better.

It had been a missing-person investigation—which usually meant dead person whose body had yet to be found—and they’d walked the narrow streets that faced the fiefs without—quite—touching them. The Law still ruled in this old, boarded-up manor house, by a riverbank and a couple of narrow bridges.

She had been all of fourteen years old, and had spent six long months begging, badgering, and wheedling; when they said yes, she could follow them, she had nearly stopped breathing.

By that point, being a Hawk was the only thing she wanted, and she had held her fidget-prone hands by her sides, stiff as boards, while the Hawks—Teela and Tain for the most part, although Marcus had come along to supervise—had rambled about a series of large, run-down rooms for what felt like hours.

There wasn’t much in the way of temptation on that particular day: nothing worth stealing.

Nothing she wanted to touch.

But this was so much harder. The girl was young. Younger than many of her orphans, the kitlings she visited, taught to read, and told stories—casually censored—of her adventures to. This girl was bruised; her eyes were wide with terror, her face gaunt with either cold or hunger. And she was real.

The water did not distort her; she did not sink into the depths, beckoning for Kaylin to follow to a watery, slow death. There was an aura about her, some faint hint of magic, but there would have to be.

Kaylin knelt with care by the side of this deep, deep pond, this scion of elemental magics. She did not touch the water’s surface, but it was a struggle not to; not to reach out a hand, palm out, to the child whose dark eyes met hers.

As if he knew it—and he probably did—Severn was behind her. He did not approach the water as closely as she herself had done, but instead put both of his hands on her shoulders and held tight.

“Corporal,” she heard Evanton say quietly, “what do you see?”

“Water,” Severn replied. “Very, very deep water.”

“Interesting.”

“You?”

“I see many things,” Evanton replied. “Always. The water here is death.” He paused and then added, “Almost everything is, to the unwary, in this place.”

“Figures,” Kaylin heard herself say, in a voice that was almost normal. “But whose death?”

“A good question, girl. As always.”

“You usually tell me my questions are—”

“Hush.”

But the girl didn’t vanish until Evanton came to stand by Kaylin’s side. “You’re not one for obedience, blind or otherwise,” he told her, with just a hint of frustration in a voice that was mostly approving. “But I believe I told you to look at nothing too closely.”

“If you saw what I saw—”

“I may well, girl. But as I said, I see many things that the water chooses to reveal. There is always temptation, here, and it knows enough to see deeply.”

“This is not—”

“Is it not? Here you sit, spellbound, horrified, gathering and hoarding your anger—which, I believe, is growing as the minutes pass. It isn’t always things that tempt our basest desire—not all temptation is sensual or monetary in nature.” He lifted his hands and gestured and the water rippled at the passage of a strong, strong gust.

All images were broken as it did, and the girl’s face passed into memory—but it was burned there. Kaylin would not forget. Couldn’t. Didn’t, if she were honest, have any desire to do so.

“I know what you saw, Kaylin Neya. More of your life is in your face than you are aware of, in this place. And in the store,” he added quietly.

“This is why you called me,” she said, half a question in the flat statement.

“On the contrary, Kaylin, I requested no one. But this, I believe, has some bearing on the call the Hawks did receive. Even had I wanted to deal with the Law directly—and I believe that there are reasons for avoiding it—I would merely send the report or the request. The old, belligerent Leontine who runs the office would decide who actually responds.”

“Marcus,” she said automatically. “Sergeant Kassan.”

“Very well, Sergeant Kassan, although it was clear by description to whom I referred.” He paused, and then added, “Something was taken from this … room.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “How the hell did someone get into this room?”

“A very good question, and believe that I have friends who are even now considering the problem.”

“Friends?”

“At my age, they are few, and not all of them are mortal, but,” he added, and his face warped into a familiar, wizened expression, “even I have some.”

“And they—”

“I have merely challenged them to break into the elementarium without causing anything to alert me to their presence.”

“Good luck,” she muttered.

“They will need more than luck,” he said softly. “But I expect most of them will survive it.”

She straightened slowly, her knees slightly cricked. It made her wonder how long she’d knelt there. The answer was too damn long; she was still tired from the previous night’s birthing. But the elation of saving a cub’s life passed into shadow, as it so often did.

“What was stolen?” she asked Evanton as she rose. Her voice fell into a regular Hawk’s cadence—all bored business. And watchful.

“A small and unremarkable reliquary,” he replied. “A red box, with gold bands. Both the leather and the gold are worn.”

“What was in it?”

“I am not entirely certain,” he replied, but it was in that I-have-some-ideas-and-I-don’t-want-to-tell tone of voice. “The box is locked. It was locked when I first arrived, and the keys that were made to open it … It has no keyhole, Kaylin.”

“So it can’t be opened.”

“Jumping to conclusions, I see.”

She grimaced. “It has to be opened magically.”

“Good girl,” he replied softly.

“This isn’t really Hawk work—”

“The Hawks don’t investigate thefts?”

“Ye-es,” she said, breaking the single syllable into two. “But not petty thefts as such, and not without a better description of the value of what’s been stolen.”

“People will die,” he told her quietly, “while the reliquary is at large. It exerts its power,” he added softly, “on those who see it and those who possess it. Only—” He stopped. His face got that closed-door look that made it plain he would say no more. Not yet.

“There were two people here,” she said at last.

“Yes. Two. An unusually large woman, or a heavyset man, by the look of those treads, and an unusually small one, or a child, by the look of the second.” He met her eyes.

And she knew who the child had been.

The shop seemed more mundane than it had ever seemed when Evanton escorted them back into it. His robes transformed as he crossed the threshold and the power of wisdom gave way to the power of age and gravity as his shoulders fell into their perpetual bend.