Cast In Courtlight (47 page)

“She must be. I confess, however, that I saw little sign of it.”

Lord Nightshade began to walk toward the doors, and Lord Andellen fell in beside him; they sounded like one man by the fall of their step.

“She found the tower, as you predicted she would.”

“And passed its test.”

“And passed. If I had doubts, I have none now.”

“Less than none… you are guarded, Andellen.”

“Lord.” Acknowledgment; no argument. No lie.

“Did she see what lies at the heart of the Halls?”

Footsteps lost their perfect synchronicity. Andellen regained composure, slowly for a man of his power. “Yes,” he said at last.

“You were with her.”

“Yes.”

“Good. And what will she take from it?”

“I… do not know, Lord Nightshade.” A pause. But it was not followed by question; nor would it be. “She has power, and even the will to use it – but the will is entirely mortal.”

“And to what use, in the end, did she put the power of which you speak?” The fieflord smiled. There was no amusement in it, and no warmth. “Guard your secrets, Lord Andellen. You are capable of such caution. Kaylin Neya is not.

“Or was not, when she left. When the time comes, she will speak of what she saw. I heard the voice of the Lord of the West March,” he added softly, “when he offered her the chance to be free of my mark. No,” he added, although Andellen had not asked, “I was not with her. She did not call me. But he touched the mark, and he spoke through it – I heard his challenge clearly.

“Yet she bears the mark, still.” The smile that had briefly moved his lips was gone; his eyes were a pale shade of blue-green. “She is unwise, to the end, and in time, she will come to me.”

“And when that time comes, will she be Erenne?” Lord Nightshade said nothing for a moment. When he spoke at last, he did not choose to answer the question. “Tell me,” he said instead, “of Severn.”

Severn left his home when the light of the sun was shading toward evening; the sky was still blue, but in an hour, its edges would be crimson. Three days after the close of the Festival season, the day was still long. Long enough to encompass hours of beat duty, and the beginnings of three different investigations into the murders that the passing of the season often left in its wake.

Kaylin watched him from a safe distance – across the street, in fact. She was wearing the Hawk, and her old boots. Her pants were new. She had chosen to braid her hair, for lack of anything she could stick through a top knot, and she looked slightly younger than she was, and vastly older than she felt.

He started down the street, toward the tavern in which he so often ate – they saved him a table – but he stopped before he passed her.

Her smile was cautious as she approached him; his frown was more pronounced. “What,” he asked her succinctly, “are you doing here?”

“Minding my own business,” she replied.

“You have business that brings you here?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I thought I could, you know, walk with you for a bit.”

“On patrol?”

She shrugged. “I’m off duty.”

“And the mage?”

“Still not annoyed. Pretty damn annoying, though.”

“Law of conservation,” Severn told her.

“I don’t know that one – can it be broken?”

“If it can, it’ll be by you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Kaylin – ”

She put a hand on his arm.

“You’ve been waiting here every day for three days. What are you waiting
for?
”

She met his eyes and bit her lip. “You,” she said at last. She thought he would shake his arm free of her, and he almost did, but he stilled at the last moment, and met her gaze.

His narrowed. “What are you carrying?” He looked pointedly at the bulging satchel by her side.

“Just stuff.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. “Where are you going?”

“The Spotted Pig.”

“Liar. You ate there half an hour ago.”

He raised a brow. “And you know this how?”

“I asked. After you left.”

“You’re getting better at following.”

“You didn’t know?”

His turn to shrug. It was a gesture that bounced between them, a deflection they were both expert at.

“You watched me for seven years,” she told him quietly. “You can live with me and a couple of days.”

“I was quieter.”

“You always were.”

“Kaylin – ”

“I want to go with you,” she told him quietly.

His expression suggested about a hundred replies, and she guessed most of them weren’t considered polite in
any
company. But none of them made their way past his lips, which were closed in a pinched frown.

“It was my choice,” he told her at last. Some of the rawness slipped into the words.

“I know. Let me make one, too.” She was not above pleading with him. But pleas in the fiefs had often been silent. And Severn? He’d never been good at saying no to her. She wasn’t that child, but she had been. Nothing would change that now.

And if Severn had changed, he was not unlike the first tree; he had grown from roots that were planted in the same fief as Kaylin’s. He turned away from her, but he said nothing, and she still had his sleeve in her grasp.

He began to walk – as she had known he would – toward the bridge across the Ablayne. She didn’t so much follow as cling. She wanted to talk. About anything. About work, because it was safe. About the High Halls, because in its way, that was almost safe, as well.

But she couldn’t quite force the words past her lips; idle chatter seemed wrong here. The day seemed wrong, as well. She had lived in the upper city for seven years, and night had slowly shifted in meaning. It was the time for sleeping – and the occasional emergency call from the midwives guild.

Yet she felt, as she stepped across the first plank of the bridge, that it should have been night. That the streets should have carried the threat of ferals, that they should have been empty. It was not yet close enough to evening that they were; people filled them.

Curious people. But curiosity in the fiefs had a different tone. They were watched, but they weren’t approached. The Hawks emblazoned across their surcoats glittered, caught light, hinting at flight. At hunting. At a freedom that was beyond the men and women who labored here.

She wanted to ask him where they were going. But she knew him well enough to know that she wouldn’t get an answer. She gazed out at the streets instead, walking with the ease of long practice as if she owned them. As if the Laws of the Dragon Emperor meant something, even here.

And they did – but only to Kaylin. Severn had made it clear that Wolf or Hawk, he was still Severn. She didn’t deny him that truth; she had survived because of it.

The streets narrowed. The buildings grew older and far less stately; repair was a thing that was done haphazardly and without the proper materials. Doors sagged in frames that were weathered and old. Windows – shuttered or open – gaped above them like open mouths. There was glass in the fiefs, but it was rare. And it wasn’t found here.

She remembered this street. There was a tavern here, and the four corners were just a few blocks away. She wondered if he would go there, and followed in silence, holding his sleeve as if it were a talisman that just happened to come attached to the rest of him.

“Severn?”

He shook his head. They passed the four corners, and the attention they garnered slowed them a moment; one or two of the older people almost seemed to recognize them. But if they did, the armor and weapons they carried were a moving wall, a sign that said keep away. In the fiefs, such signs were generally obeyed. Arms were the force of law most respected here.

But he kept walking, past those corners, and past buildings damaged enough by time that no one lived in them anymore. Not even the desperate orphans that Kaylin and Severn had been. “You’re going – you’re going to the watchtower.”

He nodded.

“We found Catti there.”

And nodded again.

So much stiffness in that gesture.

“But how did you – ”

He lifted a hand, and she fell silent. So many secrets, she thought. They had never
had
secrets worth keeping, when they had lived here. Not from each other. Not more than once. Once? It was enough.

Her fingers were frozen, although it wasn’t cold. She could think of the past, walking in the present, and it didn’t enrage her. It numbed her instead. But numbness and fear were not the same. The High Halls had tested her. But they had tested Severn, as well.

He came to the gates, to the black, pocked metal of a fence. They opened inward, creaking as they did, and she saw the hole in the rounded wall of the watchtower. She wondered what it had been used for, when it had first been built. It was not like the Castle, not like the High Halls. Round, it went up several storeys, and ended in a roof that probably couldn’t even keep sunlight out. She was sure birds nested there.

But not Hawks.

She slowed as they passed through the gate, and slowed again as they walked the flat ground. Weeds grew here, although the lack of rain had turned them a golden brown that fire would consume in an instant.

No fire she could call.

“Here?” she asked him, hating his stiffness. Hating her own.

He nodded. “It was the only place,” he added softly, speaking from a place that she could almost reach, if she had the courage.

Courage was a funny thing. Like gods, it came and went at its own pleasure, and at the moment, it had deserted her so entirely she could hardly remember its presence.

The only place, he had said, and it was true. The fiefs themselves were often crowded, and very little grew here. The watchtower was surrounded by a small field of weeds, tended by seasons, and no other hand.

And yet, he led her through them. They were higher than her waist in some places, and no lower than her knees, and they bent when she stepped on them, folded when she pushed them aside.

He came at last to a place beyond the wall, nearest the eastern part of the fence. And in the weeds, he knelt, searching a moment. It wasn’t a leisurely search, although it wasn’t a desperate one; he expected to find something here.

And she saw it before his hands touched it: a stone. A large stone, uncut and uncarved. It bore no names, no symbols, and no traces of human craftsmanship. It was just… a rock. A large, bare rock.

He closed his eyes, and knelt in front of it, and she almost left him then, because she could see his face clearly in the daylight.
This
is why she had desired night and night’s shadow, even a night that contained ferals.

Because ferals weren’t the threat they had once been, and this – this absolute surrender – was worse.

She had let go of his sleeve when he had begun his search in the weeds, and she didn’t dare to take it back. Instead, after a moment of silence, she twisted her satchel around so that it fell into her lap when she knelt.

Her hands were shaking as she undid its metal buckles.

He said, without looking at her, “What are you doing?”

But she didn’t answer him; not in so many words. She had brought with her, after some careful thought, and a bit of angry haggling in the market – and at this time of year there was no other type of haggling – a few things.

He watched her as she removed them.

One was a simple doll, a thing of cloth, with wool hair and button eyes, and a small pink bud of a mouth. The other? A small wooden flute.

“Kaylin – ”

“I know I can’t bury them,” she told him without looking at his face. “I know we can’t dig them up. I can’t give them these things. They can’t touch them.”

“They’re dead,” he said almost harshly.

She nodded. “But I’m not. We’re not,” she added, still staring at the stone. She placed these odd gifts in front of it. The weeds would spring back soon, and they would be hidden from sight. Just as the grave now was.

“I wasn’t here,” she added softly and bitterly. “I
should have
been here, and I wasn’t.”

He said nothing. There was nothing he could say. But after a moment, with just a snort of something that might be disgust, he rearranged them, doll and flute, placing the one in the padded, mittenlike hands of the other. “Steffi wanted a doll. For Jade,” she added quietly. “And she wanted a flute for herself. This isn’t much of either.”

“Kaylin – ”

“But I promised them. When we had money. We never had money,” she added. As if he didn’t know. “I should have been here.”

“You said that.”

“I should have helped you. I can’t believe you carried them
both
– ”

“I couldn’t leave one behind,” he whispered. “I couldn’t choose just one of them.”

“They were already dead.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. The wind – and it was scant – made the dry stalks of weeds rustle as if they were leaves, and for a moment, she could almost feel the forest floor beneath her hands. She had planted some part of herself in that forest – but the better part of herself? It had been buried here, by Severn, while his hands blistered and bled. And it had been cold here. Cold then. The ground much harder than the ground she’d broken.

“Not even to save the world,” she whispered, bringing her hands to her face, to her mouth, to muffle the words.

She felt his arms enfold her then. She felt his chest against her back, his chin above her head. Felt his silence, like the space between heartbeats. “I keep wondering,” she continued, because she had to untangle the knot in her throat, “if someone could do for me what I did for the Lord of the Green. If they could give me the strength that I needed to bear it all.”

“Elianne.”

“And I know they can’t. Because I’m not Barrani. I’m not the High Lord. If there really are gods, Severn, I owe them. I’m never going to have to be the High Lord.”

He held her as he had not held her for years, and the years were dwindling, in this wild, untended graveyard of two. Her eyes were dry. She told herself her eyes were dry. Lying? She wasn’t good at it. Not, at least, to others.

“There’s no going back,” she continued. Harder to speak now. But just as necessary. She whispered two names. Steffi. Jade. She listened for their answer. And was relieved not to hear it, for the Barrani castelord would
always
hear the dead. And would understand how close he had come to truly freeing them.