Cast in Silence. Michelle Sagara
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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.
Morse shrugged and turned, almost bored, to look at Margot. “That should cover the cost of the window, and the inconvenience to your customers. Do you want to cause trouble for us?” The words shaded into threat, even blandly delivered.
“I will if you ever break another one of my windows,” was the curt reply.
“Fair enough,” Morse said, and turned back to Kaylin. “Well, Officer?”
Kaylin walked up to Margot, trying to remember her intense dislike of the woman. It was gone; it had crumbled. Margot wouldn’t cause trouble for Morse. No one with half a brain would. “Margot?”
“It was probably a misunderstanding of some sort,” the exotic charlatan replied. She took a second to cast a venomous glare at Billington who, with his lack of finesse and class, was standing in the street, openly counting his new money.
Kaylin was certain word of his ill-gotten gains would be spreading down the street and the bars and taverns would be opening conveniently early to take advantage of him. Couldn’t happen to a nicer man.
“Well, then,” Morse said cheerfully. “We’ll just be going.”
Kaylin said nothing for a long moment. Then she turned. “Morse.”
“I always wondered what had happened to you,” Morse told her. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to confirm the rumors.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked at Kaylin’s face.
It took Kaylin a moment to realize what Morse was looking at: her mark. Nightshade’s mark. It was so much a part of her by this point she could forget it was there. But Morse had never seen it.
“You haven’t changed much,” Morse told her, her expression replacing the harsh edges with growing distance. “Except for your cheek, you almost look the same.”
“Why did you come here, Morse?”
The woman shrugged. “I told you, I’m running an errand.”
“Is it legal?”
“I live in Barren. You haven’t been gone so long that you don’t remember the definition of law, there.”
“You’re not there now,” Kaylin said, shading the words differently this time.
Morse hesitated, the way she sometimes did when she was about to say something serious. “I am. In any way that counts. You’re not.” She looked as if she would say more, but one of the men with her approached them, and the moment, which was so thin it might cut, broke. “Yeah, legal. Unless running messages breaks Imperial Law these days.”
“Depends on what’s in the message.”
“Judge for yourself, Eli.” Morse shoved a hand into her shirt, and came up with a flattened, squished piece of paper. Or two. “It’s for you. Obb,” she added, “get your butt out of the damn glass. We’re heading back. We’re late.”
Kaylin took the letter and stared at it. Then she glanced at Severn, whose hands were still on his blades. She flinched at his expression, but she didn’t—quite—look away. She managed a shrug.
“I’ll come by later for the reply,” Morse told her.
Don’t bother, Kaylin almost said. But she couldn’t force the words out of her mouth. What came out, instead, was “Later.”
Morse nodded, and walked away; the others trailed after her like a badly behaved shadow. Only when they’d turned a corner a few blocks down the street did Severn relax enough to approach her.
“Kaylin?”
She looked at him, and then shook her head. Bent down to pick up a small slab of glass.
“Leave it,” he told her, catching her wrist. “Margot can clean it up. She’s got the money for it at the moment, and it’ll employ someone for a few hours. If she fails to clean it up, you can charge her with littering.”
She nodded, stood and looked down the street. Morse. Here.
“I knew her,” she told Severn, without once looking up at his face, “when I lived in Barren.”
He was silent. He didn’t ask her when that was; he wasn’t an idiot, he could figure it out. What he said, instead, was “Did you meet the fieflord of Barren while you were there?”
She nodded, almost numb.
CHAPTER 3
For the rest of the day—admittedly one shortened by two hours in the elemental garden—Kaylin didn’t bump into another offensive sandwich board. Severn assumed the street-side stretch of their patrol. He didn’t speak, and as Kaylin didn’t have much she wanted to say, the rest of their round was pretty damn quiet. By the end of it, she was mostly dry.
So was the letter she was carrying. She wanted to read it. At the same time, she wanted to burn it or toss it into the nearest garbage heap. Elani was fairly tidy, on the other hand, so the garbage heaps were not that close to their patrol route.
Morse, she thought. She glanced once at Severn, and remembered walking different streets, with an entirely different goal, beside Morse. Morse who could talk you deaf or cut you without blinking. She hadn’t been so scarred, back then. She hadn’t looked as old.
But she’d always looked as dangerous.
“Dinner?” Severn asked, as they headed back to the Halls.
“Will it come as much of a surprise if I say I’m not hungry?”
“Actually, it would.”
She grimaced, dredging a small smile out of somewhere. Where, given her mood, she honestly couldn’t say.
“Did you figure out what was bothering you?”
“Probably not. On the other hand, whatever it was couldn’t be as bad as what’s bothering me now.” She hesitated. Glanced at him as they reached the steps that lead into the building. “Severn—”
“We can talk over dinner. We can not talk over dinner, as well. You did a pretty good job of that on patrol.” His smile was slight, and it was shadowed, but he offered it anyway. “I told you, the past is the past. I don’t care to know what you don’t care to tell me.”
She nodded. She knew he meant it. But he didn’t know what she knew. She’d tried to tell him, but only once. Now, she had no desire to even try. Telling him about the past was one thing; telling him about the past when it had crept, unwelcome and unexpected, into the present was another.
What had she expected?
When she’d crossed the bridge over the Ablayne, when she’d stepped foot on the cobbled and patrolled streets of the Emperor’s