Cast in Ruin. Michelle Sagara
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the deaths that rage—and her unbridled magic—had caused.
His silence could have meant many things, but since his face was as expressive as cold stone, she didn’t bother to look at him.
“I would like you to peruse the rest of the documents,” he finally said.
She did. It wasn’t a small pile—although it wasn’t Leontine in proportion—but there really weren’t that many cases in which she’d lost control of her inexplicable magic to such devastating effect; she had literally skinned a man alive. She didn’t regret it. Not in any real way. He would have died anyway, after his trial. But…the trial had been moot, and Marcus had not been happy.
The next report made her right hand tighten into a white-knuckled fist before she got halfway down the first page. It wasn’t a case report. It wasn’t a report that the Halls of Law would ever generate.
It was, instead, a report on the Guild of Midwives. She almost dropped the report on the desk. Instead, she forced her hand to relax—as much as it could—while she read. It detailed all the emergency call-ins she’d done—and it detailed, in some cases, the results. She lifted the top page. Her memory wasn’t the best, but she thought, looking briefly at dates and commentary, none in a hand she recognized, that it was more complete than anything she could have written for him, had he asked.
Grim, she flipped through the pile, and was unsurprised to see that he also had a similar report for each visit she’d made to Evanton’s shop on Elani street. This angered her less; she knew the Dragon Court spied on Evanton.
There was a brief report of her visits to the High Halls, again not much to fuss about; there was a report on every visit she had made in recent months to the fiefs—any fief crossing. There was a report that followed her movements to, and from, both the Leontine Quarter and the Tha’alani Quarter. Diarmat was silent as she read, as if waiting for a reaction she didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing.
But the final report was of the Foundling Hall.
CHAPTER 2
It took all the self-control Kaylin had ever mastered not to crumple the document into a ball and throw it. She couldn’t even read it, although her eyes grazed the words, recognizing dates and familiar names.
“So,” Diarmat said in his cool, clipped voice. She forced herself to meet his gaze—or she tried. He wasn’t looking at her face; he was staring, inner membranes fully extended, at her wrist. She glanced at it. The gems on the bracer she wore were flashing brightly enough that they could be clearly seen through layers of clothing.
The lights cut through her anger as if they were a cold, cold dagger.
Get a grip, she told herself. It’s a piece of paper. It’s just another damn piece of paper. It’s not like all the rest of the reports didn’t make clear that the Court had followed every damn move she’d made for years; why would she expect they’d somehow miss her visits to the Foundling Hall? She took a slow, deep breath—the type of breath she’d learned to take when she’d been injured and she was in pain.
The lights on the bracer began to dim, but they dimmed slowly.
Only when they were no longer visible did she turn to face Diarmat, the reports shaking in her tightened hands. Without a single word, she handed them back to him. He waited for a minute before nodding and retrieving them. “That will be all.”
She turned and made her way toward the doors, but stopped before she touched them and turned back. “They’re my hoard,” she told him quietly. She didn’t have to shout; Dragons, like Leontines, had a very acute sense of hearing.
His eyes were a pale shade of copper. “You are mortal,” he replied with no hesitation whatsoever. “Mortals neither have, nor understand, the concept. The word hoarding,” he added with genuine distaste, “is possibly as close as your inferior race can come.”
She turned instantly on her heel and pushed the doors open; words were burning the insides of her mouth, and she couldn’t let them out in his earshot. But when the doors were halfway open, he said, “Private.” Human hearing was inferior, and he hadn’t raised his voice; he wasn’t speaking his native tongue. She pretended not to hear him, and escaped into the hall.
She was halfway down that hall—her guide having failed to materialize—when she ran into Sanabalis. Sadly, head down, body tilted in that particular forward angle that was a fast walk threatening to break into an all-out run, it was literal. She bounced; he didn’t budge. A half-formed apology slid out of her mouth as she righted herself and looked up.
“I see your first class ended early.”
She nodded.
“Join me.” It wasn’t worded as a request, and he didn’t actually wait to see if she was going to treat it as one; he turned and began to walk down the hall. Since this implied that he knew where he was going—and since she didn’t—she fell in behind him. He led her from the unfamiliar halls to ones she’d walked through often enough that she could find her bearings.
He walked, not surprisingly, to his rooms, opening the door and holding it while she entered—as if he half suspected she’d turn and bolt for the exit if he wasn’t watching. Since it happened to be true, she didn’t begrudge him the suspicion. There was no food in the room, but the comforting set of impressive windows still looked out at the three towers of the Halls of Law, and even though it was now evening, they could be seen clearly in the moon’s light, reminding her, at a remove, of why she was here at all.
She drew a deep breath, and the line of her shoulders sagged when she exhaled. But she faced the towers, not the Dragon Lord, as they did.
“The lesson?” Sanabalis asked quietly.
She shrugged. It was stiff, and she felt her shoulders bunching up around her neck again. “I survived.”
“Did you walk out?”
“No. I was dismissed.”
She heard Sanabalis exhale. “Lord Diarmat does not generally teach—when he is given to do so—in his personal quarters.”
“No? Does he do it in an abattoir instead?”
She felt the brief heat of his snort, and turned. “The Palace Guard has several open yards, and a handful of enclosed rooms, for the purpose of training.”
“He’s not training me to be an Imperial Guard.”
“No.”
“What, exactly, is my relationship to Lord Diarmat in the Hierarchy, anyway?”
“What is your relationship to the Human Castelord?”
“Pardon?”
“I believe you heard the question.”
She thought about it for a bit, and then said, “I don’t have one. He presides over the Caste Court. He meets with the Emperor on matters of governance. I owe him nothing; he owes me nothing.”
“Unless you choose to take refuge in the Caste Court.”
It was never going to happen. “I don’t understand the question.”
“No. You don’t. Lord Diarmat is part of the Dragon Court. In theory, you owe the Dragon Court itself no fealty; your oath of office is to the Emperor’s Law, and not directly to the Emperor himself. The Emperor is, however, your Commander, in a strictly technical sense. The titles the Dragons are given are a sign of public respect, no more.
“You would not, however, sneer publicly at your caste lord.”
“No.” She would never, if Marcus or the Hawklord had anything to say about it, meet the human caste lord.
“In a like fashion, you tender Diarmat the respect that is his due as a councilor of the Emperor. He is not, however, your Commander; the line of command for the Halls of Law passes from the Emperor directly to the