Читать книгу Cast In Secret - Michelle Sagara - Страница 9

The first thing Kaylin had been taught when she’d been allowed to accompany groundhawks on her first investigation of a crime scene was Do not touch anything or we will never bring you back. This also meant, Do not embarrass us by attempting to steal anything. The Hawks were pretty matter-of-fact about her upbringing; they didn’t actually care. The fiefs couldn’t be actively policed, so it wasn’t as if anything she’d done there was on record. If she had been canny enough to survive life on the streets of Nightshade, tough enough to emerge unscathed, and idealistic enough to want to uphold the Law rather than slide through its grip, so much the better.

It had been a missing-person investigation—which usually meant dead person whose body had yet to be found—and they’d walked the narrow streets that faced the fiefs without—quite—touching them. The Law still ruled in this old, boarded-up manor house, by a riverbank and a couple of narrow bridges.

She had been all of fourteen years old, and had spent six long months begging, badgering, and wheedling; when they said yes, she could follow them, she had nearly stopped breathing.

By that point, being a Hawk was the only thing she wanted, and she had held her fidget-prone hands by her sides, stiff as boards, while the Hawks—Teela and Tain for the most part, although Marcus had come along to supervise—had rambled about a series of large, run-down rooms for what felt like hours.

There wasn’t much in the way of temptation on that particular day: nothing worth stealing.

Nothing she wanted to touch.

But this was so much harder. The girl was young. Younger than many of her orphans, the kitlings she visited, taught to read, and told stories—casually censored—of her adventures to. This girl was bruised; her eyes were wide with terror, her face gaunt with either cold or hunger. And she was real.

The water did not distort her; she did not sink into the depths, beckoning for Kaylin to follow to a watery, slow death. There was an aura about her, some faint hint of magic, but there would have to be.

Kaylin knelt with care by the side of this deep, deep pond, this scion of elemental magics. She did not touch the water’s surface, but it was a struggle not to; not to reach out a hand, palm out, to the child whose dark eyes met hers.

As if he knew it—and he probably did—Severn was behind her. He did not approach the water as closely as she herself had done, but instead put both of his hands on her shoulders and held tight.

“Corporal,” she heard Evanton say quietly, “what do you see?”

“Water,” Severn replied. “Very, very deep water.”

“Interesting.”

“You?”

“I see many things,” Evanton replied. “Always. The water here is death.” He paused and then added, “Almost everything is, to the unwary, in this place.”

“Figures,” Kaylin heard herself say, in a voice that was almost normal. “But whose death?”

“A good question, girl. As always.”

“You usually tell me my questions are—”

“Hush.”

But the girl didn’t vanish until Evanton came to stand by Kaylin’s side. “You’re not one for obedience, blind or otherwise,” he told her, with just a hint of frustration in a voice that was mostly approving. “But I believe I told you to look at nothing too closely.”

“If you saw what I saw—”

“I may well, girl. But as I said, I see many things that the water chooses to reveal. There is always temptation, here, and it knows enough to see deeply.”

“This is not—”

“Is it not? Here you sit, spellbound, horrified, gathering and hoarding your anger—which, I believe, is growing as the minutes pass. It isn’t always things that tempt our basest desire—not all temptation is sensual or monetary in nature.” He lifted his hands and gestured and the water rippled at the passage of a strong, strong gust.

All images were broken as it did, and the girl’s face passed into memory—but it was burned there. Kaylin would not forget. Couldn’t. Didn’t, if she were honest, have any desire to do so.

“I know what you saw, Kaylin Neya. More of your life is in your face than you are aware of, in this place. And in the store,” he added quietly.

“This is why you called me,” she said, half a question in the flat statement.

“On the contrary, Kaylin, I requested no one. But this, I believe, has some bearing on the call the Hawks did receive. Even had I wanted to deal with the Law directly—and I believe that there are reasons for avoiding it—I would merely send the report or the request. The old, belligerent Leontine who runs the office would decide who actually responds.”

“Marcus,” she said automatically. “Sergeant Kassan.”

“Very well, Sergeant Kassan, although it was clear by description to whom I referred.” He paused, and then added, “Something was taken from this … room.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “How the hell did someone get into this room?”

“A very good question, and believe that I have friends who are even now considering the problem.”

“Friends?”

“At my age, they are few, and not all of them are mortal, but,” he added, and his face warped into a familiar, wizened expression, “even I have some.”

“And they—”

“I have merely challenged them to break into the elementarium without causing anything to alert me to their presence.”

“Good luck,” she muttered.

“They will need more than luck,” he said softly. “But I expect most of them will survive it.”

She straightened slowly, her knees slightly cricked. It made her wonder how long she’d knelt there. The answer was too damn long; she was still tired from the previous night’s birthing. But the elation of saving a cub’s life passed into shadow, as it so often did.

“What was stolen?” she asked Evanton as she rose. Her voice fell into a regular Hawk’s cadence—all bored business. And watchful.

“A small and unremarkable reliquary,” he replied. “A red box, with gold bands. Both the leather and the gold are worn.”

“What was in it?”

“I am not entirely certain,” he replied, but it was in that I-have-some-ideas-and-I-don’t-want-to-tell tone of voice. “The box is locked. It was locked when I first arrived, and the keys that were made to open it … It has no keyhole, Kaylin.”

“So it can’t be opened.”

“Jumping to conclusions, I see.”

She grimaced. “It has to be opened magically.”

“Good girl,” he replied softly.

“This isn’t really Hawk work—”

“The Hawks don’t investigate thefts?”

“Ye-es,” she said, breaking the single syllable into two. “But not petty thefts as such, and not without a better description of the value of what’s been stolen.”

“People will die,” he told her quietly, “while the reliquary is at large. It exerts its power,” he added softly, “on those who see it and those who possess it. Only—” He stopped. His face got that closed-door look that made it plain he would say no more. Not yet.

“There were two people here,” she said at last.

“Yes. Two. An unusually large woman, or a heavyset man, by the look of those treads, and an unusually small one, or a child, by the look of the second.” He met her eyes.

And she knew who the child had been.

The shop seemed more mundane than it had ever seemed when Evanton escorted them back into it. His robes transformed as he crossed the threshold and the power of wisdom gave way to the power of age and gravity as his shoulders fell into their perpetual bend.

He was once again the ancient, withered shopkeeper and purveyor of odd junk and the occasional true magic. And this man, Kaylin had chattered at for most of her adolescence. If Severn was circumspect—a word she privately hated—she had no such compulsion.

“You think there are going to be murders associated with this theft.”

He didn’t even blink. “Indeed.”

“Or possibly already have been. When exactly did you notice this disturbance?”

“Yesterday,” he replied, his lips pursed as he sought his impossible-to-miss key ring.

“But you don’t think it happened yesterday?”

“I can’t be certain, no. As I said, I’ve sponsored a bit of a contest—”

She lifted a hand. “Don’t give me contests I can’t enter.”

He lifted a brow. “Oddly enough, Private, I think you’re one of the few who could. Possibly. You make a lot of noise, on the other hand, and it may—”

“Evanton, please, these are people’s lives we’re talking about.”

“Yes. But if I am to be somewhat honest, they are not lives, I feel, you would be in a hurry to save.”

“You’re dead wrong,” she said, meaning it.

“About at least one of them,” he said softly. “But if I am not mistaken, she is not—yet—in danger. I feel some of the mystery of their entrance can only be answered by her.”

“By a child?”

“You might wish to fill the corporal in on what you saw,” Evanton told her.

“It’s not necessary,” Severn replied, before Kaylin could. “I have a good idea of what she saw.”

“Oh?”

“She gets a particular look when she’s dealing with children in distress.” He paused and then said, voice devoid of all texture and all emotion, “Kaylin has always had a weakness for children. Even when she was, by all legal standards, a child herself.

“And that’s not a look she gets when the child is happy or looks well treated,” he added softly. “Then, she’s only wistful.”

Evanton nodded as if everything Severn had said confirmed what he already knew. “Very well. You make a good team,” he told them both. “He’s much better for you than those two Barrani slouchers.”

Kaylin sidestepped the question in the old man’s words. Remembered the brief touch of Severn’s palms on her cheeks. But that was personal. This was worse.

“What will the manner of death be?”

“That, I cannot tell you. It is very, very seldom that I invite visitors into the elementarium, and with cause. You felt compelled to touch nothing and take nothing, because that room had nothing to offer you.”

“I felt compelled—”

“Yes, but not to take, Kaylin. Not to acquire. And I cannot yet tell you why the water chose to show you the girl. I can only tell you that what you saw was in some fashion true.”

“She called me by name.”

He spun so fast she almost tripped over him and sent them both flying—which in his case would probably have broken every bone in his frail body. She managed to catch herself on the wall.

“By name?” he asked, one brow melding with his receding hairline.

She nodded.

“Ah, girl,” he said, with a shake of the head. He turned away again. “If I had found you first—”

“What does it mean?”

“I cannot say for certain,” he replied. “But this much, I can guess—she touched the heart of the elemental water, and woke some of its slumbering intent. It wants you to find her, Kaylin.”

“And that’s a bad thing.”

“It may well be,” Evanton replied. “But if I told you—if I could honestly tell you—that it would mean the end of the Empire itself were you to pursue it, you’d pursue it anyway.

“Water is canny that way. It sees into the deeps that we hide.” But he turned away as he spoke.

“Evanton—”

“Old man—”

He stopped as Severn and Kaylin’s words collided, but did not look back. “If you’re about to accuse me of knowing more than I’ve told you, stand in line and take a number,” he said in a voice so dry a little spark would have set it on fire. “I’m a very busy man. Do come and visit again.”

“Kaylin—”

Kaylin lifted a hand and swatted her name aside.

“You’re going to crack the road if you don’t stop walking like that.”

“Severn, I don’t have a sense of humor about—”

“Almost anything? Fair enough. I’ve been accused of that.”

She stopped walking. Although his stride was easily the longer of the two, she’d been making him work to keep up. Not that it showed. Much.

Since her entrance into the ranks of the Barrani High Court, Kaylin had grown more aware of Severn; of where he was, how close he was, or how far. It was as if—as if something bound them, something gossamer like spider’s web, but finer, and ultimately stronger. She had given him her name—if it was her name—and he had accepted it.

But he had never used it. When she shut him out, he accepted the distance.

It’s not my name, he had told her quietly, it’s yours. If I understand Barrani names at all.

I’m not Barrani.

You’re not human. Not completely. But you’re still Kaylin.

Could you? Could you use it?

He’d been quiet for a long time; she could still remember the texture of that silence, the way he’d stared at her face for a moment, and then turned away almost wearily. What do you want me to say, Kaylin?

She hadn’t answered. She wasn’t certain.

“We have to find her,” she told him, her voice quieter now.

“I know. Any idea where to start?”

Missing Persons was a zoo. Almost literally. Although the offices that fronted the public square in the Halls were slightly better equipped and more severe than the interior offices in which Kaylin spent much—too damn much—of her day, they were in no way quieter.

For one, they were full of people who would never—with any luck—wear a uniform that granted them any kind of Imperial authority. For two, the people who milled about, either shouting at each other, pacing, crying or shouting at the officers who looked appropriately harried, were by no means all human; although here, as throughout most sectors of Elantra, humans outnumbered the others by quite a large margin. For three, many of the visitors were either four times Kaylin’s age, or less than half of it. Kaylin recognized a smattering of at least four languages, and some of what was said was, in the words of Caitlin, “colorful.”

Impatience was the order of the day.

Missing Persons was, in theory, the responsibility of the Hawks. Depending, of course, upon who exactly was missing. Some missing persons had left a small trail of death and destruction in their wake, and these investigations were often—begrudgingly—handed over to the Wolves, the smallest of the three forces who called the Halls of Law home.

The staffing of the office, however, was the purview of the Hawklord. Or his senior officers. None of whom, Kaylin thought with a grimace, were ever on the floors here.

She herself was seldom here, and of all duties the Hawks considered their own, this was her least favorite. She was not always the most patient of people—and people who were desperate enough to come to the Halls seeking word of their missing, and possibly dead, kin required patience at the very least.

She was also not quite graceful enough to forgive other people their impatience. But at least she was aware of hers.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the vagabond.”

And, if she were entirely truthful, there were other reasons for hating this place. Grinding her teeth into what she hoped would pass for a smile, she faced the worst of them squarely.

If it was true that the Barrani had a lock on arrogance, and the Dragons on inscrutability, it was also true that for petty malice, you really couldn’t do better than finding a truly loathsome human. And to Kaylin’s youthful disappointment, she hadn’t actually had to look that far to find this one.

His name was Constant Mallory—and, give him this, if she’d had that as a name, and she’d been too stupid to change it, she might have developed a few personality ticks. He was, for all intents and purposes, the ruler of this small enclave. He answered to Marcus, and to the Hawklord, but his answers could be both disingenuous and fawning, and she thought he’d learned enough from the Barrani to dispense with truth entirely.

She was aware that he and Marcus had, as the office liked to call it, “history.” She’d once asked why, and Teela had said, with some disdain, “You really don’t pay attention, do you? How much of history is spent discussing happy children and fluffy bunnies?”

“It’s true,” Tain had half drawled. “If humans actually had a lifespan, things would have been a lot more interesting around here a few centuries ago. But that’s the problem with mortals—they get a little power and it all comes tumbling down. It’s a good thing you breed so quickly.”

Teela and Tain had no problems at all with Mallory. They didn’t like him, but then again, given the way they treated people they did like—and Kaylin had some experience with this—their lack of affection was a dubious negative. Like many humans, he treated the Barrani with respect and care. He had not always given Marcus the same respect.

Or rather, he’d given him exactly the same respect, but then again, Marcus took subtle office politics about as well as he took vegetarian menus.

Mallory had wanted the Leontine’s job. Then again, so had Marcus. Marcus had come out on top. The miracle of the tussle, to Kaylin’s mind, was that Mallory had come out alive. She gathered that not everyone had.

But getting people who’d been there to talk about it was more difficult than getting criminals to cough up useful information. And, as a harried Sergeant Kassan had finally said, “You’re usually so proud of your ignorance. Learn to live with it, Kaylin.” The implication being that living and living with it, on that particular day, were the same thing.

Mallory was tall. He was, by human standards, fit, and not even painful to look at: he was competent, quick-witted, and good with a sword. He handled his paperwork with care—a distinction that he did not fail to note on the rare occasions he was allowed to visit Caitlin’s office.

But he was a self-important prick, and he was the only Hawk of note who had spoken against her induction. The latter, she was unlikely to forget. The former, she had come to expect from the world at large.

His greeting was not in any way friendly. Her smile was not in any way friendly. It was, as Marcus called it with some distaste, a human social custom. Probably because it didn’t involve enough blood and fur.

But she had never come with Severn before.

And Severn became completely still beside her.

“Corporal Handred,” Mallory said, greeting him as if that stillness were not a warning signal. “Our newest recruit.”

Severn extended a hand, and Mallory took it firmly. “I see that they have you babysitting. It’s unusual to see the private in any company that isn’t Barrani. How are you finding the Hawks so far?”

“Interesting,” Severn replied. At least he hadn’t gone monosyllabic.

“Compared to the Wolves?”

Severn didn’t even pause. “Yes. Longer hours. I confess that I’ve seen many reports from your office, but I’ve seldom had a chance to visit in person.”

Mallory looked slightly at a loss, but he recovered quickly enough. “We do important work here,” he began, straightening his shoulders somewhat. “It’s here that most of the cases that require official attention are brought to the notice of the Law.”

“I imagine you deal with a lot of reports. How do you separate the frauds from the actual crimes?”

Mallory looked genuinely surprised, and Kaylin fought an urge to kick someone—mostly because she couldn’t decide whether or not she’d kick Severn or Mallory. Mallory took the lead, and Severn, walking by his side, continued to ask pleasant questions, his voice engulfed slowly by the office noise.

Leaving Kaylin on her own, with no Mallory vindictively standing over her shoulder. It was a trick not even Teela had ever tried.

There were two ways to get useful information about the missing persons being reported by the people who came to the Halls. The hard way—which was to take notes, to have the official artists employed by the Halls on hand, and to attempt to draw a picture of some sort that could be used as an identifier. This was both the least efficient and the most commonly used method of gaining some sort of visual information the Hawks could then use.

The second, and far more efficient, method involved the Tha’alani. And the reason it was little used was, in Kaylin’s opinion, pretty damn obvious. She looked across the crowded office as if the people in it were shadows and smoke, and against the far wall, bordered on either side by finely crafted wooden dividers, and no door, sat a gray-haired man.

At least he looked like a man from the back. But he wore robes, rather than the official uniform of the Hawks; if he was finicky about detail, there might be a gold Hawk embroidered on the left breast of the gray cloth; if he wasn’t, there would be nothing at all.

Kaylin preferred the nothing at all.

From the front, although he didn’t turn, the illusion of humanity would vanish; the slender stalks that rose from his forehead would be visible in the hallmark paleness of his face. His eyes would probably be blue; hard to tell with the Tha’alani, but then again, she usually avoided meeting their eyes—it meant she was standing too damn close.

Those stalks were their weapons, their means of invasion; they were prehensile, and they moved. They would attach themselves to the face of anyone—anything at all—in the Empire, and they would draw from that person’s thoughts everything. Everything they were told to look for. Possibly more. All the hidden secrets, the private memories, the terrors and the joys would be laid bare for their inspection.

Officially, there were no Tha’alani in the ranks of the Hawks; they were, however, always on call should the law require their services. The only office that had a Tha’alani on staff was this one, and he was a grant from the Imperial Court. All of the Tha’alani who served the Law were seconded by the Dragon Emperor. A warning to anyone who might otherwise treat them like the invasive horrors they actually were.

It was probably the real reason she hated the Missing Persons office so much. Men like Mallory were so common in her life, she could only expend so much energy hating him. Most of the time.

To the left of the stall in which the Tha’alani sat, back facing her, was a long, slender mirror edged in gold that had seen better days. It was flecked and peeling. It was also out of sight of the public, tucked as it was against the other edge of the wall and the divider.

Records.

She squared her shoulders and moved toward the mirror on the wall. It was inactive and she could see Severn and Mallory bent over Mallory’s impeccable desk, discussing something that no doubt would have bored her to tears. She probably owed Severn a drink or ten.

She walked toward the mirror, and forced herself to relax, to walk naturally. She tried to remember the one Tha’alani woman she had met that had not somehow terrified her. She was slender, and had reminded Kaylin inexplicably of warm sun in autumn. Now, however, was not the time to think of sunlight, or warmth. It made her job difficult. Instead, Kaylin tried to remember what Ybelline had said about the lives of the Tha’alani who could serve time among the “deaf,” and by that, she had clearly meant humans. Kaylin’s kind. No, wait, one of the Dragons had said that.

The Tha’alani woman, Ybelline, had corrected him gently for his unkindness, although Kaylin hadn’t bothered to be kind first.

Ybelline had somehow made Kaylin feel comfortable and safe. Had taken memories from the sleeping child she and Severn had brought with them to the office—a child kidnapped by the undead, and almost sacrificed—sparing the child the waking experience of the Tha’alani mind-touch. Holding on to that memory, Kaylin did relax.

Until she was almost at the records mirror itself, and the Tha’alani rose.

He was older than any Tha’alani she had ever met, although he was by no means as aged as Evanton; his hair, which had looked gray, was gray, and his face was lined with age, with sun and wind. His eyes were slate-gray, not a friendly color, and his lips were thin and pale.

And the disturbing stalks on his forehead were weaving in and out among themselves, as if it were the only way he knew how to fidget. It came to Kaylin as she watched them warily that he was, in fact, fidgeting.

Had she ever noticed this before?

Did they all do this?

There was no Hawk on his robes, no official sign. She wondered if he was always in this office, or if he was only here on this particular shift. Wondered, with just a faint edge of hysteria to sharpen the humor, what he’d done to deserve it, if he was.

But he bowed to her, and by this, she knew two things: that he’d risen because she approached him, and only because of that, and that he’d been somehow waiting for her. It didn’t make her comfortable. For perhaps the first time she noticed, as he rose, the deepening lines around his mouth, the slight thinning of his lips. As a thirteen-year-old girl, she had thought it a cruel expression, and that had left scars in her memory that had been slow to heal.

Now … she thought, as objectively as she could—and given she was Kaylin that was hard—that it might be a grimace of pain. And she felt, mingled with her own very visceral revulsion, a twinge of sympathy for a total stranger.

She tried very hard not to notice the way his stalks were swaying. But she did notice; they were swaying to and fro, but almost seemed to be shying away. From her. From, she realized, her revulsion.

She swallowed. Composed herself—as much as that was possible. “Private Kaylin Neya,” she said, introducing herself. She did not offer him her hand, and he did not extend his own.

“I am called Draalzyn, by my people.” The word was broken by an unexpected syllable. The Tha’alani had a language that Kaylin had never bothered to learn because as far as she could tell it contained no colorful—which is to say useful—words. It, in fact, seemed to be free of most words; when Tha’alani conversed, they conversed in silence, and only their hands and their stalks seemed to move. They also touched each other too much.

And she was projecting again. She could see that clearly by the subtle shift of his expression. She wanted to tell the bastard to keep away from her thoughts. It was her first reaction.

But a second reaction followed swiftly. She knew she was the proverbial open book; how often in her life had Severn just glanced at her face and known what it was that was bothering her? She’d never bothered to count. Probably couldn’t count that high unless it involved a wager.

And the second thought, the Tha’alani almost seemed to sense, for his expression grew slightly less severe.

“Private,” Draalzyn said quietly, “I hoped to see you at some point in time.”

“I work inside.”

He nodded. He knew where she worked; that much was clear to her. He seemed to have trouble speaking; he opened his mouth several times, as if searching for words. Or, as if he’d found them, and discarded them as useless.

She waited, eyeing the mirror, and catching a reflected glimpse of Severn as he ran interference. It wouldn’t last.

At last the Tha’alani said, “Ybelline asked me to carry a message to you, if our paths should cross.”

Ybelline. The one Tha’alani Kaylin had met that she had almost liked.

“Why me?” Unlike Draalzyn, Kaylin rarely bothered to stop the words that first came to mind from falling out of her mouth. But she remembered this honey-haired woman so clearly she felt almost—almost—protective of her. She had been so gentle with Catti, an orphan, as unwanted by the world at large as Kaylin had been at her age.

“She believed you could be of assistance to us,” he replied quietly. “And the matter is of some urgency.” He paused, and she realized that the pallor of his face was probably unnatural. He was worried. Or frightened. Or both.

“What’s happened?”

“If you would come to her dwelling in the enclave—or if you would choose a meeting place that is not so crowded in the city itself, she will explain.”

Kaylin nodded.

And the Tha’alani seemed to relax; his shoulders slumped a little in the folds of his robe, as if he had been expecting something else.

Fair enough. Had it been any other Tha’alani, any at all, Kaylin would have refused. Or worse.

“She is willing, of course, to promise that there will be no intrusion, and nothing will be taken from you without—”

Kaylin lifted a hand. “I know the drill,” she said, “and you don’t have to repeat it. I—trust her. And I don’t have time,” she added bitterly, looking again at the mirror’s surface, and at Mallory.

“You wish to access records without interference?” he asked. As if he had read her—no, she told herself forcefully. It was bloody obvious he had. You’d have to be blind and stupid not to recognize the fact.

“Yes.”

“You are looking for?”

She stopped. Looked at him, truly looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. The Tha’alani worked in this office for a reason. But—

The image of a bruised child’s face rose up before her eyes, captured in water’s depths. It was so strong, so clear, that she couldn’t shake it. It was more concrete in that moment than the rest of the office.

The man waited.

She noted this, her Hawk’s training in place. And she knew as well that all real images that went into records, any real information, would come, in the end, through him or his kin.

“You know what’s in the records?”

“Not all of it,” he began.

“The recent reports. You might know if someone came in looking for a missing girl.”

“Of what age?” His eyes seemed to glaze over, as if he were a living embodiment of what the records contained, and he was accessing the data.

“Nine, maybe ten. Scraggly dark hair, dark eyes. Pale skin. Poor family, I think.”

“How long would she be considered missing?”

“I … don’t know. More than two days.” Maybe, given her condition, many more.

He was still frowning.

And Kaylin clenched her jaw tightly, stepped forward toward him, and, lifting her hands, drew her hair from her forehead. She was shaking. But the girl’s image was strong enough.

“You know this child?” he asked, understanding exactly what she offered.

“No. But I’ve seen her once.”

“And you are willing—” But he stopped. He was, by law, required to give her a long speech full of unreassuring reassurances.

None of which she had time for. He did her the courtesy of not failing to read this clearly, and held her gaze for just that little bit longer than required. She didn’t blink.

His forehead stalks began to elongate, to thin, as they moved toward her exposed skin.

“Don’t touch the mark,” she warned him.

“Ah,” he replied. “No. I will not.”

And they were feathery, those stalks, like the brush of fingertips against forehead. He did not touch her face with his hands, did nothing to hold her in place. In every way, this was unlike the first time she had submitted to the Tha’alani. But this was an act of choice.

And if he saw more than she wanted him to see, what of it? It made her squirm, the fear of exposure, and she balanced that fear—as she so often did—with the greater fear: the child’s bruised face. The frustration, anger and, yes, pride and joy that she felt just being deemed worthy to bear the Hawk. The fear of failing what that meant, all that that entailed.

The Tha’alani stalks were pale and trembling, as if in a breeze, but they lingered a long time against her skin, although she did not relive any memories but the memory of the water, its dark, dark depths, and the emergence of that strange child’s face.

Then he withdrew, and he offered her a half-bow. He rose quickly, however, dispensing courtesy as required, and with sincerity, but no more. “I better understand Ybelline’s odd request,” he told her quietly. “And I do not know if what I tell you will give you comfort or grief, but no such child has been reported missing. There is no image of her in the records.

“But go, and speak with Ybelline, Private Neya. I fear that your partner is about to lose his composure.” He bent to his desk, and wrote something carefully in bold, neat Barrani lettering. An address.