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“Evanton—”
“You know far more about this garden than anyone who isn’t a Keeper, or who isn’t trying to learn how to be one, has a right to know.”
“And you’re not about to add to that.”
“Actually, I would very dearly love not to add to that, but I am, in fact, about to do just that. What you actually understand about the garden is not my problem. That you understand that this is significant, however, is.”
“Why me?”
“That would be the question,” he replied.
“I haven’t done anything recently. Honest.”
“No. You probably haven’t. But something is happening in the city, and the elements feel it. They’re not,” he added, “very happy about it, either.”
“No kidding. Why do you think it has anything to do with me?”
“Because,” he replied, lifting his hands, “if you take the time to observe some of the visual phenomena, it’s not entirely random. The elements are trying to talk.”
Given the lack of any obvious visibility in the driving sheets of rain, Kaylin thought this comment unfair. Given Evanton’s mood, Kaylin chose not to point this out. While she was struggling to stop herself from doing so, Evanton’s hands began to glow.
Out of the light that surrounded them, a single complicated image coalesced on the tabletop, between their cups. It was golden in color, and it wasn’t a picture. It was a word.
An old word. Kaylin’s eyes widened as she looked at it.
“Yes,” he said, as her glance strayed to her sleeves, or rather, to her arms. “It’s written in the same language as the marks you bear.”
Those marks ran the length of her arms, her inner thighs and most of her back; they now also trailed up her spine and into her hair. She had toyed with the idea of shaving her head to see exactly how far up they went, but she’d never gotten around to it. Her hair was her one vanity. Or at least, she thought ruefully, her one acknowledged vanity.
Something about the lines of the word were familiar, although Kaylin was pretty certain she’d never seen it before. She wasn’t in the office, and she had no mirror; she couldn’t exactly call up records to check.
“You know what this means,” Evanton said anyway.
She shook her head. “No, actually, I—” And then she stopped, as the niggling sense of familiarity coalesced. “Ravellon.”
He closed his eyes.
The silence lasted a few minutes, broken by the sound people made—or Kaylin did, at any rate—when drinking liquid that was just shy of scalding. Eventually, she set the cup down. “You recognize the name.”
“Yes. I would not have recognized it, however, from this rune.”
“You can read them?”
“I have never made them my study; I am old, yes, but not that old.”
She lifted her cup, watching him, and after a moment, he snorted. “I can, as you must know, read some of the Old Tongue. This, however, was not familiar to me.”
“You don’t know the history of Elantra?”
“I know the history of the city very well,” he replied. His voice was the type of curt that could make you bleed.
Since Kaylin had lived for most of her twenty-odd years in ignorance of this history, she shrugged.
“I know what once stood at the heart of the fiefs.” He lifted a veined and wrinkled hand in her direction. “And before you ask, no, I don’t have any idea what’s there now. It’s slightly farther afield than I’m generally prepared to go at my age. But yes, I know it was once called Ravellon by the Barrani.”
“And the Dragons,” Kaylin pointed out.
“At the moment, my interactions with the Eternal Emperor’s Court are exactly none. The one exception to my very firm rule, you already know, and no exception would have been made had I not been indisposed.”
While she technically served the Emperor’s law, the law was a distinct entity. That the Emperor held himself above those laws was a given; he didn’t, however, require Kaylin to do the same. Of course, if he contravened those laws and she spoke up, she’d be a pile of ash.
Evanton contravened those laws by simply existing, as far as Kaylin could tell. For practical reasons, reducing Evanton to a pile of smoldering ash was not in the Emperor’s cards, and if she’d had to bet, she’d bet that the Emperor wasn’t entirely happy about it, either. The elemental garden, with Evanton as its Keeper, was literally a different world—with unfortunate placement: it demonstrably existed within the boundaries of the Empire, and the Dragon Emperor claimed everything in the Empire as his personal hoard, the single exception being the fiefs.
Dragons were very, very precise about their hoards. Kaylin didn’t understand all the nuances of what, to her mind, boiled down to mine, mine, mine, but she was assured that they existed. By, of course, other Dragons.
The store, however, could not be moved. And if it ceased to exist, the elemental wilderness contained behind one rickety door at the end of a dim and incredibly cluttered hall, would break free and return to the world from which it had been extracted. Which would pretty much end most of the lives that Kaylin cared about, although to be fair, it would probably end the other ones, as well.
The Emperor, therefore, overlooked this thumbing-of-nose at his ownership and his authority.
Evanton’s reluctance to talk with Dragons made sense. Their reluctance to speak with him, she understood less well.
He opened his mouth, and snapped it shut again. He still had all his teeth. “Ravellon,” he said, after a long pause, “is a Barrani word.”
“I don’t think so,” she began.
“It’s not the Old Tongue, then. Can we agree on that?”
Since he probably knew more than she did, she nodded.
“But you recognized the rune as Ravellon. Why?”
“I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that, Evanton. I honestly don’t. I’m not even your student—why would I try to make your life more difficult?”
“Good point. I should apologize for my temper. I won’t, but I should. It has been a very, very trying day.”
“Why is it only the three elements? Why not all four?”
“Fire in the natural world is contained, for the most part. If we were living over a volcano, and the elements felt this kind of flux, fire would be in the mix, as well. We’re not, thank the gods.” He paused, and then said, “I don’t have to tell you that none of this should leave this garden, do I?”
“It probably doesn’t hurt.” Pause. “Can I tell Severn?”
“You may tell your Corporal, yes. He’s as quiet as the dead. Well, the dead with the decency to stay buried, at any rate.” He looked, now, at his hands. “Ravellon.” He shook his head, and then stared across the table at her.
“Don’t even think it,” she replied.
He did not, however, snap back. Instead, in a much quieter voice, he said, “The fief of Ravellon—if it’s even a fief at all—is impassible.”
She nodded.
“But, Kaylin—something is stirring in the fiefs. Something is twisting in the heart of the city.”
“Evanton—”
“Be prepared, girl. What you see in that rune is not the word itself, not as spoken. But it disturbs me. Ravellon, like Elantra, was meant to be a geographical marker, not a true name.”
“It’s not. A true name.”
“As you say.”
Severn took one look at Kaylin’s very wet and bedraggled face, and turned away.
“If you’re laughing, you’re dead,” she told him. The passage back through the garden had been about as much fun as the passage to the small stone building; her boots were in her hands. Evanton was willing to put up with the rivulets dripping from every square inch of her body; he was not, however, willing to put up with the mud she would have otherwise tracked down the hall.
“It pains me to agree with anyone today,” Evanton added, “but even so, I concur.” Crossing the threshold of the door had returned dry clothing to Evanton, but his hair and his beard were plastered to his face. “And now, you both have your patrol. I have work. Where did Grethan disappear to?” he added, in a tone of voice that made Kaylin cringe on behalf of the unfortunately absent apprentice.
“Billington decided to pay a visit to Margot,” Severn replied, in as neutral a voice as he ever used. “Grethan saw him pass by and decided to investigate.” He glanced at Kaylin, who glanced at her boots and her very wet surcoat.
“Figures,” she said, heading for the door. “Did he take his goons with him, or was it just the usual courtesy call?”
“Until there’s actually an incident,” Severn told her, following in her wake, “we can leave out the name-calling.” He nodded in Evanton’s direction.
“What? Evanton’s called them far worse.”
“I,” Evanton told her, “have no professional interest in Billington.”
“Hopefully, neither do we today,” she replied with a grimace. She pushed his door open, sat heavily on his steps and worked wet feet into equally wet boots. She could swear she heard squelching.
It was not as loud, however, as the sound of shattering glass. She swore under her breath, tying laces with speed that should have rubbed her fingers raw. Thank gods for calluses.
Severn was already down the street. So was half the neighborhood. They weren’t actually pressed around the broken shards of glass; they weren’t that stupid. But they were between Kaylin and Margot’s.
What Kaylin did not need on a day that included a testy Evanton and an insane elemental garden was the responsibility of protecting Margot, a woman she despised. What Kaylin needed didn’t seem to make much difference.
And if it came right down to it, Kaylin wasn’t exactly Billington’s biggest fan, either. He was a cut above Margot when it came to business on Elani, but that wasn’t saying much; he didn’t have her face, her figure or her sheer magnetism. And to date, he’d been unable to buy or hire it, although the constant stream of young women who worked for a week or two in his storefront always caused speculation when things were slow on the beat.
He charted stars, read palms, tea leaves and hands; he also specialized in reading bumps on the head that were conveniently hidden by hair in most cases. His biggest seller, ironically enough, was a cure for baldness, if you didn’t count aphrodisiacs. Kaylin was not a tax collector, and she’d therefore never had call to examine the books of either merchant, but she was willing to bet that Margot’s love potions outsold anything Billington tried to push.
Billington was a man who was keenly aware that there were only so many people to fleece, so his envy often got the better of him. Usually this happened when he’d been drinking, and at this time in the morning, most of the bars and taverns were closed for business.
Kaylin glanced at Severn, and froze. His hand had dropped, not to his clubs, which were regulation gear, but to his waist, around which his weapons of choice lay twined. He was closer to the store than she was, and even if he hadn’t been, he was taller than most of the milling crowd, and could see above their heads.
Kaylin, who’d never been, and would never be, as tall, made do. She tapped two people on the shoulder and told them, tersely, to get the hell out of the way. Her hands were around the haft of her beat stick; nothing she had seen had made her draw daggers. And drawing those daggers on a crowded street was an invitation to a hell of a lot of paperwork; her instinctive dread of reports usually kept her in line in all but real emergencies.
The people started to argue, took one look at her surcoat and her face and backed away. They backed into one or two other people, who started to speak, and then did the same. If this was the effect of being soaking wet in Elani Street, Kaylin thought buckets of water might actually come in useful for something other than dishes.
As they cleared, she saw that Billington had, indeed, brought goons. The window hadn’t shattered by accident, and in the back of the shop, well away from the shards of broken glass, she could see the dim outline of Margot’s clientele. Margot, however, was not cowering with them. She had turned a particular shade of red-purple that clashed in every way with her hair, but somehow suited it anyway.
That, and she wasn’t a fool; she had seen Kaylin trip over her sign, and she had seen Severn right it. She knew they were walking the beat, and she knew that Kaylin’s intense dislike of her business would mean at least someone was watching her like a proverbial Hawk.
Either that or, Kaylin thought grudgingly, she wasn’t a craven coward. It’s funny how hard it was to see anything good in someone you disliked so intensely.
But in this case, it was impossible to miss. Billington was there, and Kaylin couldn’t actually see his face, but she could count the backs of his goons. They were standing along a half circle behind him, and they were armed. None of this seemed to make a dent in Margot’s operatic, if genuine, rage.
Kaylin snorted and started to walk toward them; Severn’s hand caught her shoulder. She glanced back at him and frowned.
“Something’s up,” he said, his voice pitched low enough that she had to strain to hear it. “They broke the window. But Billington hasn’t raised his voice. He’s not drunk.”
She turned to look at the display of backs again; Billington’s was the broadest, and also, by about three inches, the shortest. Severn, however, was right. Margot’s voice could be heard clearly. It always could. But no one else seemed to be talking much, and that was unusual. They seemed, in fact, to be waiting.
Broken window—that would get attention. The possibility of unrest in Elani would get attention. Whose?
Theirs. The Hawks.
She tightened her grip on her stick; Severn, however, unwound his chain. The blades at either end, he now took in each hand. He did not, however, start the chain spinning. She wondered, not for the first time, and no doubt not for the last, what he had been like as a hunting Wolf. Who he had killed? Why?
But this was not the time to ask, if there ever was one.
She took a deep breath and waded through the last of the sparse crowd until she was three yards from the closest of the backs. Lifting one hand—and her voice, because no normal speaking voice would cut through Margot’s outrage—she said, “What seems to be the problem here?”
The man standing closest to Billington’s back turned.
The world shifted. It wasn’t a man. It was a stocky woman, with a scar across her upper lip, and a pierced left eyebrow. Her jaw was square, her hair cropped very short—but Kaylin recognized her anyway. The others turned, as well; Kaylin was aware of both their movement and Margot’s sudden silence.
One of the men said something to Billington and handed him a small bag. He also handed a similar one to Margot, whose hands grasped it reflexively. Even at this distance the sound of coins was distinct and clear.
“Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the woman said to Margot. It was a dismissal. Margot’s lovely eyes narrowed; Kaylin saw that much before the woman turned to her.
“Hello, Eli.”
Words deserted Kaylin. She shifted her stance slightly, and her knuckles whitened.
“You don’t recognize me? No hello for an old friend?”
“Hello, Morse,” Kaylin said. Morse. Here.
“So,” she said, as she met Kaylin’s widened eyes, “it’s true. You’re a Hawk. You got out.” Her smile was thin, and ugly. The scar didn’t help.
Kaylin nodded slowly. “Yeah. I got out.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“You’re not in Barren now.”
“No. But I’m running a bit of a mission for the fieflord. You want to try to arrest me?” She laughed. The laughter, like the smile, was ugly and sharply edged.
Kaylin’s hands shifted on the stick she carried. But she put it up. “No.” Drawing a deep breath—which was hard, because her throat and her chest seemed suddenly tight and immobile—she added, “Unless Margot wishes to press vandalism charges.”
Margot, however, had opened the bag that had been placed in her hands.
