Cast in Ruin. Michelle Sagara
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speak Elantran and have no place to live. They also have no sense of humor.”
“Neither do you.”
“Exactly. Consider the source of the comment.”
Kaylin chuckled—but she also winced. “Sanabalis implied there were other difficulties.”
“That’s how he worded it? ‘Other difficulties’?” Morse spit to one side.
Kaylin frowned. “How bad is it?”
“There are two problems. One, we’re trying to track down, but even the Lady is having some trouble; we’re not sure why.”
“That would be the subtle Shadow that Sanabalis also mentioned?”
“That’s not what we call it, but yeah. You’re here to help with that?”
Kaylin frowned, and then nodded. “That’s my guess. What’s the other problem?”
“The border boundary,” Morse said, voice flat. There were four possible borders that defined the fief of Tiamaris—but only one was a threat to the fief’s existence: the one that faced into the unclaimed shadow that lay in the center of the fiefs.
Kaylin almost froze. “The border’s supposed to be stable.”
“Oh, it’s holding. If it weren’t, we’d all—all—be dead by now. But the freaking Shadow across the fucking border is puking out whatever it can. Nothing small and easily killed, either; apparently the bigger one-offs can survive the ‘transition’ with some of their power intact.”
Kaylin sucked in air. “When the hells did this start happening?”
“Pretty much the same day they did,” Morse replied, jerking her thumb in the direction of the strangers.
“Believe,” Kaylin said after an uncomfortably sharp silence, “that they didn’t bring the Shadows with them.”
“Oh?”
“If I understood what was said correctly, they were fleeing from them.”
“And being followed.”
“I was there, Morse. If great chunks of Shadowy one-offs had followed them into Elani, believe I would have noticed.” But she hesitated. Morse, no fool, noticed. “What?”
“When they arrived, they did this funny thing with a bunch of drums and a lot of loud chanting. It was supposed to be some sort of purification ritual, but the end result? The Dragons—all four of them—took flight over the city while they did it.” Kaylin shook her head, glancing briefly at two of those four: Tiamaris, in full scales and wings, and Sanabalis, in slightly drab but official clothing. “And…the chanting was magical, somehow.”
This admission of the use of magic by obviously dangerous giants did nothing positive for Morse’s mood.
“But…something answered them. Something in the fiefs. If I had to guess,” she added quietly, “something from the heart of the fiefs.”
“What, it was some kind of fucking challenge?” Morse’s brows rose toward the nearly shaved dome of her head. “Are they insane?”
From a fief perspective, there could only be one answer to that question. But…this fief had become, almost overnight, an exception to the rules that generally governed the fiefs. Kaylin glanced at the large huddle of strangers—she’d have to ask Sanabalis what their own name for their race was because “strangers” wasn’t going to cut it—and said, “Not insane. I think they’re used to fighting a war with the Shadows, rather than locking the doors and praying a bunch.”
“Great.” Morse glanced at Tara, who seemed to be involved in a serious discussion with Sanabalis, while Tiamaris, over her shoulder—well, part of his jaw, at any rate—looked on. Severn was beside the older Dragon, listening intently.
Kaylin frowned.
“What?” Morse said sharply.
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
She was rewarded by something that was halfway between snort and grunt; the sarcastic comment that would have usually followed failed to emerge. For Morse, this was a big improvement. “What?”
“Tiamaris is fieflord in a way that Barren wasn’t.”
“You can say that again.”
Fair enough. “Barren didn’t hold the Tower. Tiamaris does.”
“And?”
“Holding the Tower at all should prevent your one-offs from getting through.”
Morse shrugged. “The Ferals get through.”
“I know; they get through everywhere. I’m not sure why.”
“Time to find out?”
“Well past.” Kaylin turned toward the discussion that was even now taking place without them, and as she did, Tara froze. It was a very particular stillness, and it reminded anyone who happened to be standing close by that Tara’s physical form, the form of her birth, was made of stone.
It was warning enough for Kaylin, but if it hadn’t been, there was another one that followed less than thirty seconds later: the strangers began to shout, and weapons began to catch sunlight and reflect it in a way that spoke of movement.
Morse swore. Loudly. But her brief word wasn’t equal to the task of carrying over the cries and shouts—directed, not panicked—of the strangers. “Kaylin!” she shouted.
Kaylin turned.
“Incoming!”
Sanabalis’s eyes turned instantly orange as Tiamaris swiveled his head and roared. Kaylin’s ears were still ringing when the fieflord spread wings, bunched legs, and pushed himself off the ground; it was a miracle of grace and movement that prevented those wings from knocking anyone else flying. Tiamaris roared again as he rose above the heights of the standing structures erected along the border—they were few, and they were clearly meant as lookouts and not living quarters.
Severn had already unwound his weapon chain; Morse had a sword in hand. But Morse remained close by Tara, rather than running to join the giants. After a brief glance at Severn, Kaylin headed toward those giants, her own daggers still sheathed. Severn joined her; Sanabalis did not. But Tiamaris’s shadow passed above them as the drums began their rolling thunder.
What kind of people carried drums into a war zone anyway?
Kaylin noticed, as she approached the main body of the strangers, that there were no children here. There were men—and women—who looked as if they’d left youth behind, but they carried their weapons with the same grim determination that the younger men and women did. If any of them had ever survived to be elderly, they were also nowhere in sight.
They noticed her, but they were accustomed to a lack of clear communication from the humans and made no attempt to question her; they did, however, let her pass into their midst. She briefly regretted her armor; it was hard to shove it out of the way, and as she couldn’t, she couldn’t expose the marks on her arms with any ease. Those marks, the strangers did recognize in some fashion.
But Severn spoke a single curt word. “Bracer.”
Her reply was less civil. She shed splints, exposing the heavy golden manacle, and she crushed gems in sequence to open the damn thing. It clicked, she removed it and tossed it over her shoulder, remembering after it had left her hand that there were enough people behind her that it might actually hit someone. No one, however, shouted in outrage, and better yet, no one attempted to remove her head from her shoulders, so she moved in the direction of the drumming itself.
The drummers were standing behind a line of men and women who faced the interior of the fiefs; there were four drums in total that Kaylin could count. The men who beat them had weapons at their feet, but they were otherwise intent