Michelle Sagara - Cast In Fury

And she was exhausted enough to let him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Kaylin. Don’t.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That you should have been there.”

She winced. But she’d always been obvious to Severn.

“What you were doing affects an entire race. What we’ll be doing when we’re not dealing with the ugly fears of a mob will affect a much, much smaller group of people.”

“The Hawks.”

He nodded quietly.

“Why did he ask for you?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say Mallory’s name out loud.

“I don’t know. I’ve met the man once.”

“You ran interference for me when we went to Missing Persons.”

Severn nodded. “But given his feelings about you—and he was quite clear on those—I imagine that he won’t find my role as a Hawk much more to his liking.”

“He probably doesn’t know where you’re from.”

“Then he hasn’t done his homework.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.”

“No, it doesn’t. I imagine that Mallory knows quite a bit about the Hawks at this point.” He stopped. She stared at the street, and he pushed her gently up the few steps to her own apartment door. She’d gotten a new key, and it worked, but it took her three tries to get the damn thing into the lock.

“You’re tired,” he told her, when she cursed in Leontine. “Tired and Mallory are not going to be a pretty combination. Sleep it off. But understand that when you walk into the office in the morning, the rules will be different and everything will change. You wanted to be a Hawk,” he added. “Be one. Tomorrow.”

“I want to talk to the Hawklord.”

“Do that tomorrow as well.” He paused, and then added, “We couldn’t have talked to the Hawklord without speaking to Mallory first. I imagine he’s guarding the tower. Kaylin, he’s made it clear from the start, if I understand things correctly, that you should never have been a Hawk. Nothing would give him more pleasure than correcting an obvious error in judgment. But if he is a vindictive man—and I don’t discount it—he also appears to play by the rules.

“Don’t give him the satisfaction. Do nothing that he can use as an excuse. He’ll have his own worries,” Severn said.

“What worries?”

“His disdain for Marcus was widely known, and Marcus was popular.”

“Is.”

“Is what?”

“ Is popular.” She began to stumble up the narrow stairs to her rooms. “Don’t talk about him as if he’s dead.”

“Is popular,” he said, gentling his voice as he followed her. “Most of the department knows how Mallory regards the Hawks under Marcus, and if Mallory is to succeed, he can’t afford to further alienate them. But if you give him an excuse, he’ll use it.”

She opened the door to a darkening room, the shutters wired into a safe—and closed—position. She might not have cared much for Rennick, but she shared his view about morning. And still got her butt out of bed on most days.

“I’ll be good,” she told him in the darkness.

“Tomorrow.”

She nodded again and walked across the room, stepping around the piles of debris that littered it. She removed the stick that held her stubborn hair in place, and sank, fully clothed, into bed.

“Sleep,” he told her. Just that.

She wanted more. She wanted him to tell her that the bad dream would vanish in the sunlight, that she would wake up and the city would be sane, and Marcus would be chewing his lower lip and creating new gouges on his desktop while he moved offending paperwork out of the way.

But she’d grown up in the fiefs, after all, and she knew that what she wanted and what she got had nothing, in the end, in common. She didn’t cry.

But she came close when he kissed her forehead and brushed the lids of her closed eyes with his fingertips.

She woke up to a loud, insistent knocking at her door. Daylight had wedged its unwelcome way through the shutters. She had to remember to get them fixed. Say, by putting a block of stone in their place.

She checked her mirror before she made her way to the door, still wearing the rumpled clothing from the day before. She paused. Someone had messaged her. Someone had tried to get her attention, but they hadn’t tried for very long. She didn’t want to check, besides which, the pounding at the door wasn’t stopping anytime soon. She bypassed the mirror, because if the first thing she saw this morning was the afterimage of Mallory’s unwelcome face, she’d break the damn thing, and the mirror was the most expensive thing she owned. She wouldn’t have bothered with the expense—gods knew she never had money—but her duties at the midwives guild pretty much made it a necessity.

Severn was standing in the door frame when she opened the door. He handed her a basket. “Breakfast,” he told her. “Eat.”

“What time is it?”

“Not so late that you don’t have time to eat.” It wasn’t precisely an answer. She lifted the basket top, and the smell of fresh bread became the only thing in the room. That and her growling stomach. “Hey,” she said, as she sat on the bedside and motioned Severn toward the chair. “Is this enchanted?”

“The bread?”

Her frown would have killed lesser men. “Very funny. The basket.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I didn’t smell the bread at all until I opened it.”

“It keeps the rodents at bay. More or less.”

“Where’d you get it done?”

“Evanton’s.”

“He’d like it. It’s practical.”

“I think he thought it perhaps too practical. But he took the money.” He paused and then added, “It keeps the food fresher, as well. It won’t last forever,” he said, “but it lasts longer. Which, given the insane hours you generally keep, also seemed practical.”

“Wait—it’s for me?”

“It’s for you.”

She hesitated, and then nodded. “Thanks. Did you talk to Mallory?”

“Last night.”

“The Hawklord?”

“No. I’ll say this for Mallory, that paperwork is going to get done before the week’s out.”

“Ha. I’ve seen that pile—most of it was there when I got inducted.”

“Betting?”

“Sure. We can pool in the office.”

“Actually, we can’t.”

Silence. It didn’t last longer than it took to finish swallowing something that could have been chewed longer, judging by the way it lodged in the back of her throat. “We can’t bet? ” To a fiefling, it was like being told don’t breathe.

“It’s not in keeping with the formal tone he feels is professional in office environs. He is looking forward to correcting the laxity.”

Kaylin’s bread now resembled clay. Her stomach was kind enough to stop growling, so her throat could pick up the sound.

“Change your clothing,” he added. “And you may have to get your hair cut.”

“What?”

“I think you heard me.”

“My hair?”

“It’s not regulation length.”

“Neither is Teela’s!”

“I believe he intends for all of the Hawks to sport regulation cuts.”

If she hadn’t swallowed the mouthful, she would have probably sprayed it across the room. “He thinks he can make the Barrani cut their hair?”

“He hopes to make his mark on the office,” Severn replied, a perfectly serious expression smoothing out the lines of his face. “I think he believes it will speak well of his tenure if he can be seen to have effected changes that Marcus could not.”

“Marcus never tried.”

“No. But there are no Barrani in Missing Persons. There are no Leontines. There are no Aerians.”

“So what you’re saying is you think he failed Racial Integration classes as well.”