Читать книгу Cast In Fury - Michelle Sagara - Страница 8

Kaylin wanted to sleep for a day. Sadly, she wanted that day to be now, and would also have liked it to be longer by forty-eight hours than the average day. Ellis didn’t talk a lot; the effort of making Elantran words was obviously not trivial. But, mindful of Severn’s dictate, he encouraged her to eat and drink.

He must have either had younger siblings or spent time in the Tha’alaan watching other people’s children, because his form of coaching left something to be desired. The cooing, Kaylin admitted to herself, might be cute—and even hilariously funny—on another day.

Like, say, a day in which she didn’t feel like she’d been on the losing end of a bar brawl with the occupants of an entire tavern. But the food did help, as did the effort of keeping the ill humor out of the words she was speaking to a child. She did not, however, offer to let him touch her forehead with his stalks. If he wanted to be castelord, he was going to damn well have to learn how to talk the hard way.

And explaining the words that she was thinking to a young child of any race—never mind a young child with an entire Quarter’s worth of parents and grandparents in attendance courtesy of the racial gift of mindspeaking—was not on her list of things to do on any day.

When she had finished eating and drinking everything—and Ellis had shaken the waterskin up and down just to make certain—Ellis tried to help her to her feet. She was certain that her knees would recover from the way she had to fall in order not to crush him.

But even at her crankiest—and this was pretty much the nadir—she found something about his solemnity touching. She stumbled beside him as he led her to Ybelline because, even if she couldn’t read minds, it didn’t take mind-reading to know that he considered this babysitting of a Real Adult a task of honor and importance, and she didn’t want to take it away from him.

She was entirely unprepared for Ybelline, because Ybelline met her on one side of the arch that Ellis, talking to her as if she were a sick puppy, was urging her toward. Ybelline’s hair was down—literally—in a honey-gold cascade that obscured her shoulders. Her eyes were the same color, the same almost gold, almost brown. The light that came in—far too brightly—from the open windows and half-walls seemed to have stopped there for the sheer pleasure of illuminating the castelord of the Tha’alani.

The Tha’alani woman who wasn’t classically beautiful—if there was such a thing—was radiant anyway. She had changed into a simple, cream gown that fell from her shoulders to her ankles unimpeded. All of this, Kaylin took in at a glance—and even if she’d wanted to see more, she wouldn’t have been able to, because Ybelline Rabon’alani crossed the distance, ignoring Ellis’s loud warnings, and enfolded Kaylin Neya, scruffy and severely under-rested Hawk, in her arms.

It felt like home, to Kaylin. She let her forehead lean against the taller woman’s shoulder, and she wanted to stand that way forever. But that wasn’t why she’d come, and she knew that Severn and Rennick were waiting somewhere. She hoped that Rennick hadn’t offended anyone. Anyone else.

“He’s been remarkably quiet,” Ybelline replied, speaking with the ease of long practice.

“That’s probably bad.”

Ybelline was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was guarded. “Possibly bad for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“He was at the longhouse. I would have refused him entry into the Quarter, but I was … distracted.”

“You had every right to be. The others—”

“They’ll live. They’re well.” Her voice was soft, and soothing.

“Good. I wanted—”

“You had to be the one to help them. Kravel was beyond us,” Ybelline added. “Even had we been able to heal him in other ways, he would have been lost to the Tha’alaan. But they have seen, and they have understood. Not all of your kind are insane. Not all of them are so maddened by fear that they must, in turn, be feared.”

“They’ll forget,” Kaylin said.

“They are not human, Kaylin. They will not forget.”

“And if they do, you’ll remind them?”

Ybelline shook her head, and her hair brushed Kaylin’s face as she lifted it. “No. You are not Tha’alani. But you have touched the Tha’alaan. What you understand might change in time—but they will remember you because they desire it. Not one of them wishes to fear the whole of a race. To fear even the ones who injured them is burden enough.

“And it is my fault and my responsibility. I have worked among your kind for most of my adult life, and I didn’t think before I left the Quarter. I didn’t think about how it would look to people who have so little knowledge. I should have realized—”

“You were trying to save a city. You had a lot on your mind.”

The smile on Ybelline’s face was wry, but the panic was gone. “Have you had a chance to speak at length with Richard Rennick?”

A number of answers came and went. Kaylin said simply, “Not at length.” It was about as polite as she could be, given everything.

“Then you understand what he has been ordered to do?”

“More or less.”

“Can you please explain it to me? No, not the reasoning behind that—believe that given the events of this past week, I understand the reasons perfectly. I don’t, however, understand exactly why this task was given to Rennick. I do not understand how what he produces—which by Imperial mandate must be untrue—will serve the goal of educating the … public, as Mr. Rennick calls people.”

Had this been a normal day, Kaylin’s head would have hurt. And since misery loves company, she said, “Maybe we should answer this question while Rennick is actually there.”

All in all, not her brightest suggestion.

She was escorted—having been parted from Ellis with gods only knew what difficulty—by Ybelline into the main hall whose chief decoration was a large table, with simple chairs, and the occasional flower in a bowl or a vase to add any color that wasn’t provided by faces.

Rennick in particular was an odd shade of gray. He was separated from the rest of the Tha’alani by Severn, and if the seating arrangement was accidental, Kaylin would have eaten her hat. Or her hairpin, given she didn’t own a hat. There were only five other Tha’alani in the room, all in robes very similar to Ybelline’s, which, given the heat and the humidity of the season, made sense.

Sense and clothing seldom went together, in Kaylin’s experience, and she didn’t recall seeing robes like this the last couple of times she’d braved the Quarter, so she assumed they were some sort of formal dress. Whether or not this assumption was right, the dress seemed to be accepted wear for both the three men and the two women. The colors of the dress were basically the same—a creamy gold that was almost white. The shoulders had different embroidery at the height of the seam, which might—although she doubted it, given the Tha’alani—be some sort of symbol for their rank.

Rennick rose when she entered the room. He was quiet, but not for lack of trying; if she’d seen a better imitation of a fish out of water, she couldn’t offhand recall it.

“At ease,” she told him. When this comment appeared to make no sense to him—and given Severn’s expression, it wouldn’t—she said, “Sit down.”

He sat. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be the one sitting?”

“I slept.”

“For three hours,” he added.

She could have told him that three hours after a day like this was a catnap, but didn’t. “I think we have the worst of the difficulties facing the Quarter from the inside in hand,” she told him instead. “The difficulties facing the Quarter from the other side of the guardhouse, not so much. You’ve been talking to the Tha’alani for the last three hours—what have they told you?”

“Nothing.”

She looked across to Severn. He shrugged. “Rennick thought it was relevant to ask them everything they knew about you,” he replied.

“Oh. They don’t know much.”

“She called you here to help, and they don’t know much?” He didn’t trouble to keep the scorn from his voice, but on the other hand, no scorn would probably be no voice, for Rennick.

“They don’t know much they want to share at any rate,” she told him. “And I’m not your job. They are. You saw the casualties,” she added.

He nodded, wincing slightly. “They’re all going to survive. One of the men got up and walked away.”

“He was probably less injured than he looked.”

“Private Neya?”

“Yes?”

“Learn to lie better. Or don’t bother. Bad lies insult the intelligence of the listener, and I believe that you don’t want to insult me.”

This wasn’t exactly true, but Kaylin was too tired to start a fruitless argument, which was generally when she started them. “Humans almost killed those men,” she told him, meeting and holding his gaze. “Humans saved them. We’re done with that now. Move on.”

“And where, exactly, would you like me to move?”

“To the part where you stop humans from wanting to kill any of the Tha’alani ever again. We brought you here because we thought you’d see a bit more of what the Tha’alani are like. Today wasn’t their usual day, so that’s a wash. But none of them want to hurt you and they certainly don’t want to read your mind.

“They just want to be left alone. They tried to save the city, and we’re going to make sure that people understand that.”

One of the Tha’alani men in the room stood. “It is to address this concern that we are here,” he said, in stilted Elantran. He didn’t bow to her, which was good. “But there is some concern.”

“We’re here to address those concerns,” she said, wearing her best Hawk’s face although her head really was throbbing. “Humans have … stories. Those stories aren’t like the Tha’alaan,” she added softly. “They’re not real stories. People don’t experience them as memories, and they certainly don’t live them the way some people can live old memories in the Tha’alaan.”

“These stories, are they true?”

Kaylin looked to Severn for help. As a rule, she didn’t ask for rescue, having learned early that it was pointless. But when it came to people, Severn was just better. He always had been.

Ybelline, however, lifted a hand. “Scoros,” she said, “sit. The stories that she speaks of are not true in the sense that our stories are true. They change with time, they change with the teller of the tale.”

He frowned.

“Scoros,” Ybelline added to Kaylin, “is a teacher. He teaches the Tha’alanari, and he is respected. He understands what they will face.”

Kaylin nodded.

“It is however very seldom that my kin are exposed to your stories, and some explanation will be required.”

Severn shrugged again. “You were always better at creating stories than I was,” he told her.

“But not better at lying.”

“No. This however is yours.”

She pressed her palms into her closed eyes for a minute. Then she nodded.

“Understand,” she said, addressing all of the Tha’alani present, “that humans don’t have the Tha’alaan. We don’t have access to perfect memories. I can’t remember clearly what I was doing eight years ago—but if you wanted to, you could. I can construct what I was probably doing eight years ago. And if it was utterly necessary, I could ask Ybelline to actually sort through my memories and tell me what I was doing—but without the help of the Tha’alani, if my twelve-year-old self wasn’t doing something in easy reach of Records, there’s no way for me to be certain.”

Scoros nodded; clearly this was nothing new to him.

“This is especially true of people who have had no sleep for a few years.”

Scoros frowned and Ybelline said, “She is not being literal.”

His frown deepened slightly, and then eased. Ybelline was speaking Elantran for their benefit, but, clearly, was speaking in other ways as well.

“The oldest of our stories are probably religious stories,” Kaylin continued. “Stories about the gods.”

“These are the ones you remember?”

“Me? Not exactly. When I say oldest, I mean, the oldest ones that anyone knows about.” She winced and gave up. “The earliest stories we’re told, we’re told as children, usually by our parents, sometimes by our friends. Children don’t always have enough experience to understand very, very complicated things, and stories are a way of explaining the world to them.”

“But they’re not true.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“We do not understand what you are explaining, then.”

Scoros looked at Ybelline. Ybelline looked at Kaylin. Kaylin looked at the tabletop.

And Rennick stood up with a disgusted snort.

“Rennick, sit down,” Kaylin told him.

Rennick didn’t appear to hear her. Given the color he was turning, it might not have been an act.

“Castelord,” he said, managing somehow to be polite and icy at the same time. “Do you have no art, here?”

She frowned. “Art?”

“Paintings. Sculptures. Tapestries. Art.”

“We have,” Scoros answered. His voice had dropped a few degrees as well.

“If what I’ve heard today is true, the Tha’alani have perfect memory. Anything, at any time, that any of you have experienced, you can recall. True?”

“Rennick—”

“No, Private. If I am to do my job, as you so quaintly call it, I need to understand what I’m working with, or working against. You aren’t even asking the right questions.”

“Rennick—”

“Kaylin, no,” Severn said, his quiet voice still audible over the echoes of Rennick’s much louder tirade. “He’s right. My apologies for the interruption, Mr. Rennick. Please continue.”

“Is it true?”

Scoros was silent for a moment. Kaylin imagined that he was trying to figure out what Rennick’s game was. She could sympathize. “It is as you say,” Scoros said.

“What is the purpose of your art?”

“Pardon?”

“Why do you make it? The sculptures? The paintings? The tapestries?”

“What does this have to do with your stories?”

“Everything.”

“I am not an artist,” Scoros replied. “But I will attempt to answer. We create these things because they are beautiful.”

“Beautiful? More beautiful than life? More beautiful than what’s real?”

Scoros’s silence was longer and quieter. When he spoke again, the chill in the words was gone. “Yes. And no. They are not the same.” The tail end of what might have been a question colored the last word.

“But you could find beautiful things, surely, in the—what did you call it? The Tha’alaan?”

“Yes. That is what it is called.”

“Can you?”

“Yes. But it is not a simple matter of demanding beauty and having it surrendered to us. We are not the same person. No two of us think exactly the same way, although to the deaf—”

“Scoros,” Ybelline said softly.

“To the humans,” Scoros corrected himself. “To your kin, we might seem thus. We do not have the range of … differences. Even so, some memories will strike different Tha’alani as beautiful but not all.”

“Yes, well. You can find beauty, but you choose to create it instead?”

“Some of my kin do so, yes.”

“Imagine, for a moment, what it is like to be my kin.”

“Rennick—”

Scoros, however, stood. The two men faced each other across the length of the table. Severn kicked Kaylin under the same table, motioning for silence.

“He doesn’t understand what they’ve suffered,” she hissed.

“Then allow Scoros to make that clear, if that is their wish.”

Scoros’s antennae were weaving frantically in the air, and Ybelline’s were doing a similar dance. But watching the two, Kaylin could see the differences in their gestures, these antennae that had seemed so much like a threat. Ybelline’s movements were graceful and exact, as if each rise and fall of stalk was perfectly timed and deliberate. Scoros’s looked like whips.

Two conversations. Two arguments.

Scoros turned to Rennick. “I spend little time imagining anything else,” he told the playwright. Ice was gone; fire was present. He was angry. “My job—my duty—is to prepare our young for life in your world. And it is a life that they are not suited to live. They do not lie, they do not fear, they do not hoard. Nor do they steal or kill.

“Imagine what it is like to be you? What is it, exactly, that you do that allows you to come here and speak thus to us? You create these—these lies—and you spread them. And you are proud of this. Do you think we want to serve—”

“Scoros.” If Kaylin had ever wondered whether or not Ybelline’s kindness was based in strength, she had her answer. There was steel there.

“What do you value?” Scoros snapped, retreating from the previous sentence as if it were death. “Gold. Precious gems. Fine cloth—things. How do you reassure yourself of your own worth? By soliciting the admiration of people who value only that much. You spoke of love, in your travesty of—of—disinformation. What do you know about love? Your love is little better than base greed and insecurity! You want the regard of your peers, but you allow none to be peers. You want impossible, stupid things.

“You kill each other, rape each other, steal from each other—how are you to speak our truths? How are you to decide what beauty means?”

“Because it doesn’t matter what it means to you, or your kin. It only matters what it means to mine.” Rennick folded his arms across his chest. He appeared to be entirely unfazed by the fury that he had provoked. Kaylin, head pounding, couldn’t say the same. “I don’t demand that you like us. I don’t care if you respect us.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first race to look down on us, you certainly won’t be the last.

“And you interrupted me,” he added quietly.

Scoros’s eyes rounded. He was actually shocked.

“So, clearly you’ve thought about some of what it means to be us. Let me direct your thoughts to other aspects. You speak of fear—how do you recognize it if you don’t feel it yourself?”

“A fair question, Scoros,” Ybelline said pointedly. “Please answer it.”

“We understand fear,” he replied stiffly. “Nothing that lives is without fear. We fear for our sick, when the doctors have done all they can. We fear for our children. We fear—”

“Do you fear death?”

“No. Pain, perhaps, but not death.”

“Do you fear to be forgotten?”

“We will never be forgotten, while even one of us lives.”

Rennick lifted a hand. “And the rest?”

“The rest?”

“Greed. What you call human love. You don’t feel it?”

“We’ve all felt greed,” was the equally stiff reply. “We were all children once.”

“And love?”

“We do not mean the same thing by that word.”

“Very well. Speak of your meaning, mine is no longer an issue here.”

Scoros’s antennae waved again in the air, and Ybelline’s snapped back.

Grudging every word, and speaking in the stilted way of Tha’alani who are using language they are not familiar with, Scoros said. “It is joy, to us.”

“And what do you love?”

“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our … husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”

“Plural?”

“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”

“I … see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly doubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.

“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.

“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.

“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.

“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”

“But they’ll be lies.”

“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.

“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.

“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”

“Why would you say this? You said you don’t care about my kin,” said Scoros.

“I don’t care if they hate me,” he replied mildly. “It would hardly be the first time someone has. But … I do care about the city. I don’t want it torn apart by riots. I don’t want to see your people burned out of their homes.

“I can do this. Private Neya and Corporal Handred seem to have some understanding of your people, and they’ve been assigned to work with me. I don’t ask you to trust me. But the Emperor does, and in the end, we all live at his whim.”

Or die by it. Kaylin bit her tongue, hard, to keep the words on the right side of her lips. She thought Rennick had finished, but he surprised her. There seemed to be no end to his words.

“I admit that when I was handed this task, I did not consider it carefully enough. I considered it … political propaganda. Something useful for the Emperor, and of no consequence to the rest of us. Because of that, I could take … shortcuts. I could tell the easy story, pull the cheap strings. I was wrong, and I apologize for my ignorance. And I thank the Hawks for bringing me to your Quarter, because I understand better what’s at stake.

“I also understand that you are forbidden to speak of what actually happened … but I imagine, now, that what Private Neya believes is true. You did what you could to save the city. It’s not something I would have dared,” he added, “given public fear and sentiment. I would have holed up in my rooms in the Palace. I did, in fact, do just that.

“But from those rooms, I can now enter the fight in a different way. I will think about the Tha’alaan, and the tidal wave, and the fact that you walked out to meet it.” He turned toward the door, and then looked at Kaylin and Severn, both still seated. “Private? Corporal?”

Kaylin rose with effort. She bowed stiffly to the Tha’alani, and nodded once to Ybelline. But she lingered in the room as Severn and Rennick left it, and found that the wait was rewarded.

The Tha’alani, as one, seemed to shrink, their shoulders losing the unnatural stiffness of anger, their jaws unclenching. Their antennae were weaving in a riot of motion, beneath strands of hair that had curled with the city’s damn humidity.

“We thank you, as well,” Ybelline told Kaylin.

Scoros rose. “For saving our kin,” he said, “we offer no thanks—they are your kin as well, Kaylin Neya. You are the only one of your kind to be welcome in the Tha’alaan—and it holds some small part of your memories.”

She paled. “I tried—”

“Yes. You tried. And much was withheld, and we are grateful for that absence as well. But what you could not withhold, all can see. And believe,” he added, with a slight smile, “that all did see. They know you are not of the Tha’alani, and that you cannot again touch the Tha’alaan—but those moments were enough. They know you, and they will not fear you.

“But … your companion is both infuriating and surprising, and I think … I think perhaps we will trust him. And it is for that, that we offer our thanks.”

Kaylin nodded slowly. “I don’t like him much,” she replied at length, “but he surprised me as well. And as he can’t be bothered to be polite when his life depends on it—trust me, I’ve seen him with Dragons—he probably wasn’t lying about his concern. Or his apology.”

“You must join them. We have the Swords at our gates, and I do not think we will risk our own again until things are calmer.”

“Swords are better. They know how to calm a crowd.” She didn’t say anything about the most drastic of crowd-calming methods. She knew, as they all did, that the human mob outside was vastly less likely to attack the Swords.

The carriage was waiting for them. The Swords had ensured that. They had also ensured that all of the wheels and fine gilding were still intact, although the Imperial Crest probably had a lot to do with the fact; not even the most drunken and wayward of idiots thought his life worth defacing an Imperial Crest. It wasn’t a mistake you could repeat.

“Please drive us to the Halls of Law,” Severn told the coachman.

“You’re not coming back to the Palace?”

“Not for the remainder of the day.” Day wasn’t quite the right word for the shade of pinkish purple the sky had gone. “We will report to you in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Rennick said.

“Yes.”

“When in the morning?” The playwright now looked uncomfortable.

“We report for duty, fully kitted out, at eight.”

“In the morning?”

Severn nodded, his expression deliberately bland.

“Well, you can report,” Rennick said. “But bring some cards, or whatever it is you do when you’re not doing anything else—I’m a bear at that time of the day.”

“A bear?” Kaylin asked, inserting herself into the conversation.

“A figure of speech. Mornings make me grouchy.”

“We didn’t arrive in the morning today,” she told him.

“Exactly. And your point is?”

“It probably speaks for itself.” She tried to imagine Rennick in a more foul temper, and gave up quickly. There were some things it was better not to know.

“I will be sleeping at that ungodly hour. I think you should see about arranging some sort of shift work.”

She imagined the face full of fur that was an angry Leontine. You did not mess up Marcus’s schedule without a pressing reason to do so—end of all life as we know it being one.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she murmured, staring out the carriage window as the city rolled past.

Severn shook her awake when they arrived. The front doors were manned by Aerians. Clint was still on duty, which was unusual, given the hour. She took a few minutes to find her feet, and tried not to imagine her bed.

They made their way to the front doors, and Kaylin stopped as Clint lowered his halberd. “Aren’t you off duty?” she asked.

“I pulled in a favor.”

“You pulled in a favor.”

“Yes.”

“So you could stay later, guarding a door that no one ever attacks, with a halberd that hasn’t seen real use in more than a decade.”

“Less than a year,” he replied. “But yes, I take your point. We were in the fiefs at the time.”

“Point returned. But why exactly did you pull in a favor to work a double shift when you’re on duty in the morning? Clint?” She didn’t like the expression on his face. At all. “I’ve had a long day,” she said, running her hands over eyes that felt like they were full of sand. “So I’m a bit slow.”

“Be quicker,” he told her, without smiling. “I thought you would come back a bit earlier. I knew you’d be back before tomorrow.”

“This—what’s happened, Clint?” She pulled a memory out of her exhaustion: a Sword offering her his sympathies. It seemed like he’d said it weeks ago.

“You won’t like it,” he said, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever that this was an understatement. “But it doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious, Kaylin. You get away with a lot when you’re dealing with Marcus, because he’s seen how much you’ve changed in seven years. He saw you at thirteen. He watched you struggle to become the Hawk that you are now. Part of him still thinks of you as if you’re thirteen years old, and that’s not likely to change.”

“And so?”

“Kaylin, please understand that this is important. All jokes about your punctuality aside, Marcus accepts you as you are. Not all of the older Hawks feel the same way, and not all of them have been won over.”

She stared at him dumbly and was surprised when he handed his polearm to the other guard, and caught her shoulders in both hands. His wings were high; he was worried. “I’m very fond of you,” he said, his gaze an unblinking shade of gray that was unlike any color she’d seen. “But I took my oaths, and I’m sworn to uphold them. I also need to eat, and feed my family.”

“Clint—what are you talking about? Why are you saying this?”

“Because the people you will now be dealing with will not be Old Ironjaw. And if you don’t deal carefully, you won’t be a Private. It’s as simple as that.”

“W-what happened?”

“There was an incident,” he continued carefully. “Involving the Leontine Quarter.”

“What happened, Clint?”

“We’re not entirely certain. Teela and Tain are trying to ferret out information, but any information we get is going to come to us when we’re off the payroll. Understand?”

She nodded, although she didn’t.

“Marcus has been stood down. He’s been relieved of duty.”

“On what grounds?”

“Kaylin—we don’t know what happened. But the case has been referred to the Caste Courts, not ours.”

“What case?”

“Someone died.”

“Pardon?”

“A Leontine from a prominent clan died. He was killed by another Leontine. That much, we do know.”

“How?”

“The death didn’t occur in the Leontine Quarter. However, none of the witnesses were harmed, and remanding all investigations involving that death to the Caste Courts is well within the dictates of the Law.”

“But—”

“Marcus was present at the scene of the crime.”

“What do you mean, present?”

Clint closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clear, and his face had hardened into lines that Kaylin hated to see there. “He is currently in the custody of the Caste Court, awaiting a trial on murder charges.”

For once, Kaylin had no words to offer. A million questions, yes, but they were jammed up in the tightness of her throat.

“Corporal Handred?”

“Here.”

“You’ve been instructed to report for duty to the acting Sergeant.”

“The acting Sergeant? Clint!”

The Aerian to his left was an older man that Kaylin recognized. There wasn’t an Aerian on the force that she didn’t know by name, because there wasn’t an Aerian on the force who hadn’t been begged, pleaded with and cajoled by a much younger Kaylin. They could fly—they could carry her with them.

“Breen?”

Breen had clearly decided to let Clint absorb all the heat of this particular conversation, but his dusky skin, pale brown to Clint’s deep, warm darkness, looked a little on the green side.

“To whom am I to report?” Severn asked.

The hesitation was almost too much to bear. But when Clint finally spoke, it was worse.

“Sergeant Mallory.”