Kitabı oku: «Cast In Shadow», sayfa 2

Kaylin and Severn could not likewise lift hand—but their background in the fiefs hadn’t made the gesture automatic. Lord Grammayre was under no such disadvantage; he lifted his ringed hand in greeting, and lowered his chin slightly.

“Tiamaris has some knowledge of the fiefs,” he told them both. Tiamaris lowered his perfectly raised hand, and turned to face them.

Something about the man’s eyes were all wrong; it took Kaylin a moment to realize what it was. They were orange. A deep, bright orange that hinted at red and gold. Her own eyes almost fell out of their sockets.

“You have the privilege,” Lord Grammayre told her quietly, “of meeting the only member of the Dragon caste to ever apply to serve in the Halls of Law.”

Severn recovered first. He laughed. “It’s true, then,” he said, to no one in particular.

That rankled. “Like you’d know true if it bit you on the ass.”

“You really are a mongrel unit.”

“No, Severn,” the Hawklord replied softly. Too softly. Had it been anyone else speaking, Kaylin might have dared a warning kick.

She hoped Severn hung himself instead.

Severn fell silent.

“The Hawks have always been open to those who seek service under the banner of the Emperor’s Law. Where service is offered it is accepted, by whoever offers it. Tiamaris has chosen to make that offer, and it has been accepted, by the Three Towers. And the Emperor. If the Wolves choose different criteria upon which to accept applicants, that is the business of the Lord of Wolves; if the Swords choose to retain only the mortal races, that is likewise the concern of their lord.

“I would, of course, be pleased to explain your mission. But I have spent precious hours in this tower, and I have other duties to which I must attend. The Lords of Law meet within the half hour.” He reached into the folds of his robes and pulled out a large gem.

Even Kaylin could see it glow.

He held it a moment in his open palm. “This contains all of the information the Hawks have been able to gather about your mission. Some of it was placed within the gem by the Tha’alani, some was placed there by Wolves and Swords. You will study it,” he added quietly, “and it will tell you all you require.

“If you have questions, contain them. You will have to find answers on your own. You will speak to no one of what you see within the gem. It is spellbound, and it will enforce that command.”

He hesitated a moment, and then, lifting his hand, he gestured. Kaylin fell an inch to the ground and stumbled, righting herself.

“Kaylin.”

She turned. Saw that he held out both his open hand and the large gem it contained—to her. For just a minute she considered the wisdom of a different occupation.

But her past would follow her out the doors; here it was hidden. Without a word, she held out a hand, and he dropped the crystal into the shaking curve of her palm. Blue light seared her vision; her fingers closed instinctively.

She was surprised when she didn’t throw it away.

“Interesting,” the Hawklord said softly. She thought he might say more, but the meeting with the Lords of Law clearly demanded his full attention. “You are dismissed,” he said quietly. “You may speak with Marcus. Tell him that you are to be equipped in any reasonable manner. Remind him that the equipment is not to be logged.

“That is all.”

CHAPTER
2

Judging by the quality of the silence, which had gone from absolute to cryptlike, Iron Jaw still hadn’t recovered his good humor, such as it was. The people who usually occupied the desks in line of sight seemed to have developed an extended case of lunch. Kaylin’s stomach really wanted to join them. Either that, or to lose the breakfast she hadn’t had. She couldn’t quite decide which.

Severn. Here. Her hands were fists, which, given that one of them was clutching something with sharp edges, was unfortunate. If it hadn’t been years since she’d badly wanted to kill someone—and face it, she wasn’t angelae—it had been years since she’d tried. Her timing, as always, was impeccable.

Marcus looked up from his paperwork. She wondered which poor sacrificial soul had delivered it. She didn’t envy them.

“Well?” He growled.

She shrugged. Not really safe, given his mood—but she was in a mood of her own. “We need a safe room,” she told him, waving the crystal she still clutched.

His brows rose, or rather, the fur above his eyes did. When it settled, he looked annoyed. Nothing new, there. “West room,” he said, curtly. “And those two?”

“Ask the Hawklord.”

His lip curled back over his teeth, and she decided that his mood trumped hers. “Severn,” she said curtly. “Formerly of the Wolves.”

“Here?”

“I said formerly.”

“And the other?”

“Tiamaris. He’s a …”

The low growl deepened. The Leontine slid around the desk, paperwork forgotten.

Tiamaris stood his ground. Stood it with such complete confidence, Kaylin wondered if anything ever shook him.

“That’s a caste name, isn’t it?” the Leontine asked.

“That is none of your concern, Sergeant Kassan,” Tiamaris replied. His voice gave nothing away. Kaylin was impressed. Not that he knew Marcus’s rank—anyone who knew the uniform could see that—but that he knew his pride name.

Marcus drew closer, and as he did, he gained height—or at least his fur did. It was a Leontine trait, when the Leontine felt threatened. That usually only happened in the presence of his wives or his kits.

Severn sat on an empty desk and folded arms across his chest, smirking. Kaylin almost joined him. Almost.

But she didn’t want to be where he was; she had decided that a long time ago. Wouldn’t think about it here, because if by some miracle Marcus didn’t go feral, she might, and she didn’t want to be the cause of an office death. Not when the Hawklord had made clear what the price of that death would be.

“Tiamaris, you said?” Marcus’s growl could sometimes be mistaken for a purr. Kaylin kept a flinch in check as she realized Iron Jaw was actually speaking Barrani. It was the formal language of the Lords of Law, and as he was allergic to most forms of formal, he seldom used it.

Tiamaris raised a dark brow. They were almost of a height. Marcus continued to close; Tiamaris continued to mime a statue. Inches fell away.

Men. “Actually, Marcus, I said it,” Kaylin lifted the crystal as if it were an Imperial writ.

To her surprise, Marcus actually turned to look at her. But if his gaze was fastened on the crystal she held, his words were for Tiamaris. “This is my office,” he said quietly, each word textured by the full growl of a Leontine in his prime. “These are my Hawks. If you … choose to work here, you accept that.”

“I choose to serve at the pleasure of the Lord of Hawks,” was the neutral reply. It, too, was in Barrani. Kaylin realized that she had not heard Tiamaris speak in any other language since he’d entered the tower.

Kaylin tried again. “We’re to be kitted out,” she began. “And the Hawklord—”

“He told me.” He turned his gaze back to Tiamaris. “This isn’t finished,” he said quietly.

“No,” Tiamaris concurred, in an agreeable tone of voice that implied anything but. “It’s barely begun. Sergeant?”

“Take the West room,” he replied, eyes lidding slowly. Kaylin knew, then, that Tiamaris was close to death. Would have been, had he not been a Dragon. “Kaylin, show them.”

She took a deep breath. Thought about telling them all that she wasn’t their babysitter. Thought better of it a full second before her mouth opened on the words. “Right.” She offered a very sloppy salute, palm out but not exactly flat. It was also, she realized, as Iron Jaw stared at it, the wrong hand.

“You two, follow.”

“Whatever you say,” Severn told her, sliding off the desk. “Lead on, Kaylin.”

The West room was one of four such rooms, and they were all just as poetically named. The Leontines didn’t really go in for fancy names. Near as Kaylin could tell, the Leontine word for food translated roughly as “corpse.” Some accommodations had to be made in culinary discussions.

When Marcus had first taken the job, the safe rooms—like all of the rest of the rooms in the labyrinthine Halls of Law ruled by the Hawklord—had been named after upstanding citizens, people with a lot of money or distant relatives of the living Emperor. Marcus had pretty much pissed in every possible corner in the Hawks’ domain, and after he’d finished doing that, he’d fixed a few more things. Starting with the names.

Still, in all, West was better than some seven syllable name that she wouldn’t be able to pronounce without a dictionary. Now if he’d only do something about the damn wards on the doors….

Before she touched the door, she turned to Tiamaris. “Don’t antagonize him,” she said quietly.

“Was I?”

She didn’t know enough about Dragons to be certain he had done so on purpose. But she knew enough about men. “Marcus crawled his way up the ladder over a pile of corpses,” she replied. “And we need him where he is. Don’t push him.”

For the first time that day, Tiamaris smiled.

Kaylin decided that she preferred it when he didn’t. His teeth weren’t exactly like normal teeth; they didn’t have the pronounced canines of the Leontine, but they seemed to glitter. His eyes certainly did.

She pushed the door open and walked into the room.

“Severn,” she said, the name sliding off her tongue before she could halt it, “sit down. Tiamaris?”

“Kaylin?”

“We can’t proceed until the door is closed—the gem is keyed.”

“Ah.” He crossed the threshold into the small, windowless room. It looked like a prison cell. On the wrong days, it was. And the prisoners it contained? She shuddered.

The door slid shut behind him. Severn sat, lounging across a chair as if he were in his personal rooms. Tiamaris sat stiffly, as if he weren’t used to bending in the middle.

And Kaylin stood between them, between the proverbial rock and a hard place. She looked at Severn. Looked at the familiar scars that she’d never forgotten, and looked at the newer ones.

She wanted to kill him.

And he knew it. His smile stilled, until it was a mask, a presentation. Behind it, his blue eyes were hooded, watchful. His hands had fallen beneath the level of the plain, wooden table that was the only flat surface that wasn’t the floor.

“Are you really a Hawk?” He asked casually.

“Are you really a Wolf?”

They stared at each other for a beat too long.

“Kaylin,” Tiamaris said quietly. “I believe you have business to attend to.”

“I’m a Hawk,” she replied.

“Why?”

“Why?” Her hand closed around the crystal. “Yeah,” she said to Tiamaris. “Business. As usual.”

There had been a time when she would have answered any question Severn had asked. Any question. But she wasn’t that girl, now. She had no desire to share any of her life with him. Instead, she looked at the crystal. Some hesitance must have showed, because Tiamaris raised a brow.

“You are familiar with these, yes?”

“I’ve seen them,” she said coldly.

“But you’ve never used one.”

She shoved nonexistent hair out of her eyes, as if she were stalling. Her earlier years in the streets of the fiefs had proved that lies were valuable. Her formative years with the Hawks had shown her that they were also usually transparent, if they were hers. At last, she said, “No. Never.”

“If you would allow me—”

“No.”

Another brow rose. “No?”

The word sounded like a threat.

“No,” she said, finding her feet. “The Hawklord gave it to me. You try to use it, and if it’s keyed, we’ll be picking you out of our hair for weeks.”

His smile was not a comfort. He held out his hand. “I have the advantage,” he told her softly, “of knowing how to unlock a crystal.”

After a pause, in which she acknowledged privately that she was stalling, she said, “Why is he sending a Dragon into the fiefs?”

Tiamaris shrugged. “You must ask him. I fear he will not answer, however.” His eyes narrowed, gold giving way to the fire of red. “I confess I am equally curious. Why has he chosen to send an untried girl there?”

“I’m not untried,” she snapped. “I’ve been with the Hawks for seven years.”

“You’ve been with the Hawks,” he replied, “since you were thirteen. By caste reckoning, you were a child, then. You reached your age of majority two years ago. In accordance with the rules of Law, you have been a Hawk for two years.”

“Caste reckoning,” she snapped, “is for the castes. I grew up in the fiefs. Age means something else, there.”

“So,” Tiamaris said, splaying a hand across the table’s surface. “That was true.”

She looked at him again. How much do you know about me? Which wasn’t really the important question. And why?

Which was. “You’ve been a Hawk for a day, if I’m any judge.”

“Two,” he replied.

“It takes longer than two days to make a Hawk.”

He shrugged. “It takes only the word of the Hawklord.”

He was, of course, right. She cursed the Lord of the Hawks in the seven languages she knew. Which wasn’t saying much; she could only speak four passably, but she was enough of a Hawk that she’d picked up the important words in the other three, and none of them were suitable for children or politics.

Languages were her only academic gift. She’d failed almost every other class she’d been forced to take. Lord Grammayre had been about as tolerant as a disappointed parent could be, and she’d endured more lectures about applying herself than she cared to remember. At least a third of them had been delivered in Aerian, he’d been that annoyed; it was his habit to speak formal Barrani when addressing the Hawks, although when frustrated he could descend into Elantran, the human tongue.

“The crystal,” Tiamaris said.

She’d bought about all the time she could afford. Grinding her teeth—which caused Severn to laugh—she put her left palm over it; caught between her palms, the crystal began to pulse. She felt its beat and almost dropped it as it began to warm; warmth gave way to heat, and heat to something that was just shy of fire.

She’d touched fire before; been touched by it. Someplace, she still bore the scars. But she’d be damned if she let a little pain get in her way. Not in front of these two.

The crystal was beating. She felt it, and almost recognized the cadence of its insistent drumming. After a moment, she realized why; it had slowed, timing itself to the rhythm of her heart.

Which was too damn loud anyway.

“Here we go,” she said softly.

Kaylin.

The Hawklord’s voice was unmistakable. She relaxed, hearing it; it was calm and almost pleasant. An Aerian voice.

Kaylin, witness.

The fiefs opened up in her line of sight; she lost track of the room. She could see the boundaries that marked the criminal territories colloquially called the fiefs; they occupied the western half of the riverside, swallowing all but the Port Authority by the old docks. The view was top side, high; someone had flown this stretch. Someone had carried the unlocked crystal, linked to it, feeding it images, vision, the certainty of knowledge.

Grammayre? She couldn’t be certain.

The Lords of Law were the fist of the Emperor; they owed their allegiance and existence to his whim. This was a truth that she had faced almost daily for seven years. The Hawks, the Wolves and the Swords were not soldiers; they were no part of the Imperial army.

But they were allowed arms and armor, by law; in their individual ways, they kept the laws of the city of Elantra. And if that wasn’t a war, she didn’t want to see one. No one loved the guards who served the Lords of Law, but almost no one crossed them. Not outside of the fiefs.

Within the fiefs?

Old pain crossed her features, distorting them. She closed her eyes. Her vision however, was caught in crystal; she watched as the fiefs drew closer, undeniable now. Saw the boundaries beyond which the Lords of Law had little sway, held little power, and all of that power theoretical.

The armies would have more, but the Emperor seldom allowed the armies to crusade within his city.

And so the fiefs continued to exist.

In the fiefs, the slavery that had been abolished for a generation and a half still existed in all but name. Whole grand houses, opulent, golden manses, opened their doors to visitors, and within those doors, the rich could purchase anything. A moment’s illegal escape, in the smoke-wreathed rooms of the opiates. A moment’s pleasure, in the private parlors of the prostitutes. And a death, here or there, if one’s tastes shaded to the sadistic.

Sordid, storybook, the fiefs made their money off those who would never dream of living within their borders.

And the fieflords ruled. They had their own laws, their own armies, their own lieges—everything but open warfare. Open war in the city would bring the army down upon them all. This was understood, and it was perhaps the only thing that kept the fieflords in check. But in Kaylin’s experience, it wasn’t near enough. People lived and died at their whim. Money ruled the fiefs; money and power.

But the people who lived in them, who lived in the old buildings, the crumbling tenements, the small, squalid houses, had neither. They made what living they could, and they dreamed of a time when they might cross the boundaries that divided the one city from the other, seeking freedom or safety in the streets beyond.

They might as well have lived in a different country.

“Kaylin?” Tinny, robbed of the threat and grandeur of a Dragon’s natural voice, she heard Tiamaris.

“Can you see it?”

Silence. A beat. “No,” he said quietly. “The gem is, as you claimed, keyed to you. It appears you are to be our conduit to the investigation.” He didn’t sound pleased, and she knew she was being petty when she felt a moment’s satisfaction.

But the satisfaction was very short-lived; the view dipped and veered, rolling in the sky. Clint had once taken her up in the air. She’d been with the Hawks for a handful of weeks, and she was thin with the hunger that dogged most children in the fiefs; he’d caught her under the arms, and she’d clung to him, determined to fly with him.

But she had found the distance from Clint to ground overwhelming. She couldn’t follow what she saw; couldn’t do anything but shut her eyes and shiver. Wind against her face, like it was now, was a reminder of what she wasn’t: Aerian, and meant for the skies.

But he’d held her tight, and his voice, in her ear, became an anchor. He teased a sense of security slowly out of her fear, her frozen stiffness, and she had at last opened those eyes and looked. He took her to his home, to the heights of the Aeries in the cliffs that bordered the southern face of the city.

His home was not the home she had fled.

Not the home that the crystal’s flight was returning her to.

The first fief passed beneath her shadow. She saw the tallest of the buildings it contained, and saw the gallows and the hanging cage that lay occupied beside it. Someone had angered the servants of the fieflord here, and they meant it to be known; the cage’s occupant—man? Woman? She couldn’t tell from this distance—was clearly still alive.

The voyager didn’t pause here; he merely observed.

From a distance, she was encouraged to do the same. But she had seen those cages from the ground; had watched a friend die in one, had discovered, on that day, what it meant to be truly powerless.

She struggled with the crystal, but she was overmastered here. The Hawks—her place in the Hawks—had given her the illusion of power. And the Hawklord was going to strip her of it before he let her leave. To remind her—as she had not reminded herself—that she was still powerless, still young.

This is the domain of the outcaste Barrani fieflord known as Nightshade, his voice said.We do not, of course, know his real name. It is hidden by spells far stronger than those we can comfortably use. Not even the Barrani castelords dare to challenge Nightshade in his own Dominion.

She closed her eyes. It didn’t help.

You know this fief.

She knew it. Severn knew it. They had lived, and almost died, in its streets. And Severn had done much, much worse there. The desire to kill him was paralyzing. It was wed to a bitter desire for justice—and justice was a fool’s dream in the fiefs.

There are deaths here which you must investigate. More information is forthcoming.

The crystal shifted in her hands, becoming almost too hot to hold. She held it anyway as her view suddenly banked and shifted.

She was on the ground. The smell of the streets, overpowering in its terrible familiarity, filled her senses. She staggered, stumbled, stood; she looked down to see that her tunic—an unfamiliar tunic, a man’s garb—was red with blood.

She felt no pain, but she knew that this memory was courtesy of the Tha’alani, and she hated it. It was different in all ways from the distant observation of the Hawklord; it was full of terror, of pain, of the inability to acknowledge or deny either.

She stumbled in the streets, and her arms ached; she was carrying something. No, he was, whoever he was. He stumbled along the busy streets; the sun was high. Some people watched him from a distance, open curiosity mixed with dread in their unfamiliar—blessedly so—faces. None approached. None offered him aid with the burden he bore. And when his strength at last gave out, when his knees bent, when his arms unlocked in a shudder that spoke of effort, of time, she saw why; saw it from his eyes.

A body rolled down his lap, bloody, devoid of life.

He screamed, then. A name, over and over, as if the name were a summons, as if it contained the power to command life to return.

But watching now as a Hawk, watching as someone trained to know death and its causes, Kaylin knew that it was futile.

The boy—ten years of age, maybe twelve—had been disemboweled. His arms hung slack by his sides, and she could see, from wrist to elbow, the black tattoos that had been painted there, indelible, in flesh.

She had seen them before. She knew that it wasn’t only his arms that bore those marks; his inner thighs would bear them, too.

She screamed.

And Severn screamed in quick succession as she inexplicably lost contact with the gem.

Her hands were blistered; her skin was broken along the lines of the rigid crystal. And so were Severn’s. He dropped the crystal instantly and it hit the table with a thunk, fastening itself to the wooden surface.

She thought it should roll.

It was a stupid thought.

“What are you doing?” She shouted at Severn, the words ground through clenched teeth, the pain in her hands making her stupid.

“Prying the gem away from you,” he snapped back, composure momentarily forgotten.

“Why?”

He shrugged. The shrug, which started at his shoulder, ended in a shudder. “You didn’t like what you were looking at,” he added quietly.

“And it matters?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer.

“That was brave,” Tiamaris said, speaking for the first time. “And very, very foolish. The Hawklord must have gone to some expense to create this crystal. It is … obviously unusual. Kaylin?”

She shook her head. Actually, she just shook. She wanted to touch the gem again, and she wanted to destroy it. Torn between the two—the one an imperative and the other an impossibility—she was frozen.

Tiamaris said quietly, “I owe you a debt.” The words were grave. His eyes had edged from red to gold, and the gold was liquid light.

“Debt?”

“I would have taken the gem. It would have been … unwise. It appears that the Hawklord trusts you, Kaylin. And it would appear,” he added, with just the hint of a dark smile, “that that trust does not extend to his newest recruits.”

But Severn refused to be drawn into the conversation; he was staring at Kaylin. His own hands had started to swell and blister.

“Did you see it?” she asked him, all enmity momentarily forgotten. He was Severn, she was Elianne, and the streets of the fiefs had become that most impossible of things: more terrifying than either had ever thought possible.

He shook his head. “No,” he said, devoid now of arrogance or ease. “But I know what you saw.”

“How?”

“I’ve only heard you scream that way once in your life,” he replied. He lifted a hand, as if to touch her, and she shied away instantly, her hand falling to her dagger hilt. To one of many.

He accepted her rejection as if it hadn’t happened. “I was there, back then,” he added quietly. “I saw it too. It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

She closed her eyes. After a moment, eyes still closed, she rolled up her sleeves, exposing the length of arm from wrist to elbow.

There, in black lines, in an elegant and menacing swirl, were tattoos that were almost twin to the ones upon the dead boy’s arms.

She was surprised when someone touched her wrist, and her eyes jerked open.

But Tiamaris held the wrist in a grip that could probably crush bone with little effort. Funny, how human his hands looked. How human they weren’t.

She tried to pull away. He didn’t appear to notice.

But his eyes flickered as she drew a dagger out of its sheath with her free hand. She’d moved slowly, and the daggers made no sound—but he was instantly aware of them.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you. Lord Grammayre is not known for his tolerance of fighting among his own.”

“Let go,” she whispered.

He didn’t appear to have heard her. “Do you know what these markings mean?” He asked. His inner eye membrane had risen, lending opacity to the sudden fire of his eyes.

“Death,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he replied. He studied them with care, and after a moment, she realized he was reading them. “They mean death. But that is not all they mean, Kaylin of the Hawks.”

“This isn’t—this isn’t Dragon.”

“No. It is far older than Dragon, as you so quaintly call our tongue.”

“Barrani?”

His lip curled in open disdain.

“I’ll take that as a no.” She hesitated. These patterns had been with her since she had gained the age of ten, a significant age in the fiefs. Not many children survived that long when they’d lost their parents.

“Where did you get these?”

“In Nightshade,” she whispered.

“Who put them upon you? Who marked you thus?”

It was Severn who answered. “No one.”

“Impossible.”

“I saw them,” Severn replied. “I saw them … grow. We all did. They started one morning in Winter.”

“On what day?”

“The shortest one.”

Tiamaris said nothing. She wanted him to continue to say nothing, but he opened his mouth anyway. “I saw the bodies,” he said at last. “And the tattoos of the dead did not just, as you say, ‘start.’ They were put there, and at some cost.”

“Not hers,” Severn said quietly.

Tiamaris frowned. “There is something here,” he said at last, “that even I cannot read.”

“Do you—do you know someone who can?”

“Only one,” Tiamaris replied, “and it would not be safe for you to ask him.”

“Why?”

“He would probably take both arms.”

Severn said, “He could try.” And his long dagger was suddenly in his hand.

Kaylin looked at it. Looked at Severn. Understood nothing at all. “How do you know how to read this?” she whispered.

“I am considered a scholar,” was his cautious reply. “I dabble in the antiquities.”

Which meant magery. She didn’t bother to ask.

“Let me go,” she said wearily, adding command to the words.

To her surprise, Tiamaris withdrew his grip. “You are interesting, Kaylin, as the Hawklord surmised. But I am surprised, now.”

“At what?”

“That the Hawklord let you live.”

Kaylin said nothing.

Again, for reasons that made no sense, Severn said, “Why?” His hands had once again fallen beneath the surface of the table.

“Your story … is strange. And you must understand that the deaths in the fiefs some years ago were also investigated.”

The deaths. Seven years ago. She shuddered.

For the first time since she’d met Tiamaris, his expression went bleak. The way distant, snow-covered cliffs were.

“You were there, back then,” she said softly.

“I was there.”

“And you weren’t a Hawk.”

“No.”

She lifted a shaking head. Looked down at her arms. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, even now, eyes upon her face. “But in the end, the killings stopped. Does the Hawklord know of these?”

She nodded. She almost matched his bleakness. “He knows almost everything about me.”

“And he does not suspect that you were involved in the incidents.”

Her eyes rounded. She was too stunned to be angry; that might come later.

“You don’t understand, and clearly Grammayre did not see fit to inform you. As I will be working with you, I will. The first death must have occurred—and Lord Grammayre would be acquainted with the approximate time—on the day you say these appeared. On the same solstice.”

The silence was, as they say, deafening. And into the silence, the shadow of accusation crept.

“She had nothing to do with the deaths of the others,” Severn snapped. “They were all—”

Kaylin said, “Shut up, Severn.”

To her surprise, Severn did.

“I believe you” was the quiet reply. “Having met her, I believe you.” Tiamaris looked across the table at Kaylin; the table seemed to have grown very, very long. From that distance, he said, “You said that it had started again. Tell me what you think has started.”

She swallowed. Her mouth was very dry. “The deaths,” she whispered at last. “In Nightshade. I thought—when the first body appeared—I was so certain I would die next. Because of the marks. We all were.” “All?”

Her lips thinned. She didn’t answer the question. It wasn’t any of his damn business. A different life.