The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (26 page)

Ybelline nodded gracefully. “Your consideration, Lord Sanabalis, is appreciated. We will, of course, do whatever we can, should the Emperor require our more direct intervention.”

To Kaylin’s surprise, Sanabalis ordered the driver to drop her in front of her apartment door. As she opened her side of the carriage, he said, “You will also report to the Palace in the morning.” Before she could speak, he lifted a hand—a gesture with which she was entirely too familiar—and added, “I realize that diverting you from the office directly to the Palace would cause your Sergeant some concern, and as I will have a very long night ahead of me, I wish to avoid dealing with that concern.

“Make your report to Sergeant Kassan as efficiently—and quickly—as possible. Remind him, if he is still in the same unfortunate mood, that the Emperor requires you to be both mobile and functional. I will mirror Caitlin to let her know when you will be expected.”

Kaylin mumbled something that she hoped sounded like
thank you.
It had a very throaty Leontine curl to its syllabic edges. She fumbled with the key, unlocked the door, and made her way up the stairs, all of which creaked. Fumbling with another lock was not her idea of fun. She had, at this point, no idea of fun whatsoever.

The door, however, was unlocked. She grimaced. Light leaked along the slightly warped edges where door met doorjamb. Someone had thoughtfully lit a lamp. Given that she had no lamp oil at the moment, because she didn’t have money to spend on anything but food, she could pretty much guess who it was.

“Hello, Severn,” she said, as she opened the door.

Had he been Teela, who sometimes liked to drop in, he would have been sprawled like a territorial cat all over her bed. He wasn’t; he was seated, hands in his pockets and legs extended, in one of her chairs. He had even removed the clothing that had been hanging off its back and made a neat, folded pile of it. Given what it was going to end up looking like about fifteen minutes after she’d put it on, she’d never really understood people’s obsession with folding clothing.

Severn lifted his head. “Long day?”

“To end all days,” she replied. She slung her jacket over the bottom half of her unoccupied bed, and sat down heavily on the top half.

“Let me make it slightly longer,” he replied. He held out the bracer she’d lost in the nothingness. She took it in silence. “What happened this afternoon?”

“You mean, what happened this morning?”

“No. Sergeant Kassan managed to get a fairly detailed description of your early morning with the Oracles out of the man who runs the place.”

She cringed. “He’s really not as bad as he looks. And he does keep them more or less safe. The Oracles, I mean.”

“You’ve eaten?”

“Sort of.”

“How long ago?”

“I honestly don’t know. I have no idea what time it is. Because I was deliberately not looking at the moon’s position. I like to
pretend
I’ll get enough sleep that I won’t make a total ass of myself when Marcus attempts to rip out my throat in the morning.”

He chuckled. “I brought food.”

Her stomach growled, but then again, it often did. “You ate?”

He nodded. “I had a feeling, given the location of your last call-in, that you might be hungry when you arrived. I expected the arrival to be a few hours ago, so it may be stale.”

Her stomach didn’t much care, and truthfully, she’d eaten things far worse in her time. There was comfort in food in general, comfort in the stuffed rolls in particular, and comfort in chewing because it meant she didn’t have to talk while she was doing it.

“I left the office after reporting in,” she said, speaking anyway because it was late and she knew he wasn’t going anywhere until at least a truncated version of the day’s events had passed her lips, along with stray crumbs. “I headed down to Elani. I figured I’d catch you there. I met Grethan. He told me that you were in the Elemental Garden with Evanton.”

Severn nodded. “He let you in.”

“Sort of. He meant to let me in—I swear, anything that happened was
not
his fault—but the room I entered wasn’t the Garden I know. That, and it was empty. But when I tried to leave…” She shook her head. “The hallway had separated from the door frame.”

He frowned. “Separated how?”

“There was a gap between the door and the hall it in theory opened into.”

“Small gap?”

“Oh, about ten yards and growing with each second.” She winced, and added, “Grethan must have been—”

“He was hysterical, yes.”

“Before or after you started questioning him?”

“After
Evanton
started questioning him.”

Severn continued to listen to her account of the day’s events. He said a very loud nothing when Nightshade came into the story, but once she’d managed to exit the Castle, continued to probe. It took longer than Kaylin would have liked, because what Kaylin had wanted, from the minute she unlocked the front door to the whole damn building, was to crawl into her apartment and fall into bed. It wouldn’t have been the first time she hadn’t bothered to shed clothing before she did, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

But she also understood that Severn needed to hear the rest, and frankly, that she needed him to know it. She just didn’t need him to know it
now
. The brunt of his questions involved Ybelline and Everly, and when he’d finished, he rose.

“You’re leaving?”

He glanced at the windows. “I’ll stay. You have a few hours of sleep before I throw you out of bed. I’ll take care of breakfast,” he added. Which was good, because on this little sleep, Kaylin never bothered. He pulled the other chair closer to the one he’d occupied. “Go to sleep, Kaylin. I’ll watch. I’ll keep watch.”

She meant to tell him that she didn’t need that anymore, but the words wouldn’t leave her mouth. “Did Marrin—”

“Marrin did mirror. She apparently has two day-old foundlings of a slightly unusual nature. She didn’t say more. She asked you to mirror
when you have the time.
”

Kaylin fell back into the bed. “Midwives?” she mumbled.

“No calls, there. If something strange has happened, it wasn’t life-threatening in any way that required your intervention. Kaylin. Sleep.”

She turned her back on him and stripped off most of her clothing, tossing it all over her shoulder and onto the floor. Then she shuffled over to the window-side of the bed.

He laughed. It wasn’t an entirely happy laugh.

“What?”

“I’ll sleep here.”

“It’s not as if we didn’t share a bed for most of our—”

“You were younger.”

“So were you.”

“It would be more difficult now—for me. I’ll watch,” he added, smoothing the edges off his words. “Sleep.”

And she did, thinking as she drifted off, that she really didn’t understand Severn.

True to his word, he did take care of breakfast—and it was not the usual bread and hard cheese on the run; he was cooking. Sausages, she thought, and eggs. The windows had been opened, and morning sunlight—never the best of friends—now reminded her that opening her eyes could be painful. She didn’t ask what time it was; instead, she wandered over to the bucket of water, and splashed enough of it around her face that she could at least sponge it clean. Her hands took more work, and the water was noticeably darker when she’d done. She then rooted through the impromptu closet of floor and the neat pile Severn had made of chair contents.

Brushing her hair took time; she’d managed to get paint on the ends somehow. But she finished, twisted it, and shoved a stick through the bunched folds behind her head.

“Have I ever thanked you?” She perched on the end of her bed.

He smiled. “Not often in so many words, but yes.”

“In so many words,” she said softly, “thanks.”

He turned his back toward her, setting food on plates; she wasn’t fooled. “Severn?”

He turned and offered her a plate, which she took. She balanced it in her lap.

“It’s hard,” she said quietly, while she ate. She didn’t look at him, because it was easier. “All this—sometimes it’s hard. I know I shouldn’t find it hard, but when you’re here, it’s like you bring safety with you, from years away. I feel like a child. Or like I
can
be one.”

“You don’t want to be a child.”

“No, I don’t. We didn’t have the easiest childhood, and I can
do
things here. I can make a difference. To my life. To the lives of others, even if I’m only in them for a few hours.”

He waited, and she thought he also ate; she wasn’t sure because she didn’t look. “But…sometimes I want the safety. Not the rest of the life, not that—but the sense that somewhere
is
safe.” She swallowed. There was food in it, as well as words. “What I don’t understand—what I never thought about, back then—is what
you
get out of this.” She turned, then.

He was, as she had suspected, eating. He was also silent, and sadly, much less messy than Kaylin. But as she was about to give up on getting an answer, he said, “Does it matter?”

She nodded. She’d finished, of course—but she’d always been the faster eater. “Because I’m not a child. I can’t just take and take and give nothing in return, anymore.”

“Because you won’t trust it if you do?”

That hadn’t been how she’d been thinking of it, but put like that, it made sense. “Maybe.”

He nodded, finished the last of the eggs on his plate, and rose. Rinsing his plate in the water, he waited until she’d done the same. “Time to go,” he told her quietly.

The walk there was not the usual five-minute sprint during which Kaylin was desperately hoping that time had somehow collapsed and she wouldn’t be late. It wasn’t a stroll, either, but it did allow speech. Severn started.

“I don’t have a way of asking you for what you can’t give. If I did—if I tried to make a balance sheet—” When she raised a brow, he sighed, and added, “a budget. Oh, wait, we haven’t had time to sit down and do that yet, either.”

“You’re just trying to make me see silver linings on freaking huge thunderclouds, aren’t you?”

He chuckled. “Let me try again. I’m not keeping score.” She opened her mouth, and he added, “Betting pools don’t count.”

She did laugh, then.

“If I want what you can’t give, if I want what you don’t want, and you try to give it to me, either because you feel that I’m owed—” He shook his head. “I don’t spend a lot of time around other people. As a Wolf, there wasn’t much time. But I
did
spend time observing other couples. And that interaction—it doesn’t work. Never has. You take two fairly decent people, people you like, people you more or less respect, and you put them together like that, where they’re both trying to be things they aren’t because it’s what the other person needs—it’s painful. At its worst, they’re both feeling hurt, and they both see the other person as the villain.

“If I need something you can’t give, I need to walk away, because sooner or later, all I’ll see is what you
can’t
give. I won’t be able to see what you can.”

“But—”

“But?”

“You don’t speak all that much. But when you do? You’ve always been better with words. Than me. Always.”

It was true; he didn’t bother to deny it. But he said, “I was older. You should try words some time—I think you’ll find you’ve gotten better.”

She grimaced. “I
am
trying, thankyouverymuch.”

He smiled, then. She saw that much before she dropped her gaze to her feet. Well, to their feet. “I don’t know what you get out of this. That’s all. I know what
I
get.”

“And?”

“I want you to tell me.”

He nodded. But he didn’t answer. The Halls came into view.

Marcus was in a better mood, which was to say: she didn’t hear his growling from the hall. She glanced at Severn, but Severn never looked concerned when he entered the office. She suspected only the remnants of an all-out slaughter would change that.

Kaylin jogged to the right, to the duty roster, out of force of habit. It was still a mess. But she managed to find her own name in that mess. She also found Severn’s. “We’re at the Palace, today,” she told him.

“I suspected we would be.”

She turned and made her way as quietly as possible to Caitlin’s desk. Caitlin, surrounded by the usual stacks of paper that never looked quite as precarious on her desk as they would have on anyone else’s, looked up. She was tired, but clearly happy to see Kaylin. “I hear you had a busy day, yesterday.”

Kaylin nodded. “Is Marcus—”

“Lord Sanabalis left a mirror message for Sergeant Kassan sometime last night. He received and reviewed it this morning, and then went up to the Tower. He’s still there, dear.”

“Is he in a better mood?”

“He is no longer concerned for your safety. You’ve noted your reassignment?”

Kaylin nodded. “I’m not sure it’s the smartest idea.”

“You are, of course, free to discuss that with the Sergeant once he returns to his desk.”

Kaylin winced. “I think most of the trouble we’re going to see is going to occur
on
or around Elani. Severn and I should be there. So should the rest of the groundhawks, and at best guess, two-thirds of the Swords.”

Caitlin lifted a brow, but didn’t otherwise comment. She didn’t have to, though; Marcus had now entered the office.

“Private Neya!”

A quick rundown of the previous day’s events was in order. Kaylin, having had to go through parts of it at least twice the previous day, didn’t make her usual nervous-in-the-presence-of-angry-Leontine hash of it. Marcus’s eyes, however, were a strong shade of orange by the time she’d finished. He had interrupted her maybe twice, a sure sign that he’d heard most of it from another source.

“Your presence has been requested at the Palace by Lord Sanabalis. On behalf of the Emperor.”

Kaylin nodded. “Ybelline Rabon’alani will be there, as well.

I think—”

“On occasion.”

She grimaced. He was still, clearly, in a bit of a mood.