Michelle Sagara – Cast in Silence (страница 17)

He nodded. “As I rule from the Castle.”

Tiamaris failed to hear the exchange. He had walked up to the mirror, and he now examined the image in some detail. “How long?” he asked Nightshade.

Nightshade did not pretend to misunderstand him. “The current fieflord of Barren has ruled for ten years. Perhaps nine. They are mortal years, in the reckoning of Elantra.”

“How?”

“I am not privy to even rumor. But the former fieflord—Illien—was not human. The fief lost its name along the border. I do not hear it.”

“But you hear Liatt?” Kaylin asked.

“When I touch the boundaries of my realm, I hear Liatt.”

“Would I?”

“You, perhaps. Lord Tiamaris would not.”

She didn’t ask him why, but she touched the mark upon her cheek almost reflexively.

“Was Illien alive?”

Nightshade said nothing.

“Ten years,” Tiamaris said softly. “I would have said that was impossible. Ten years of rule without—” He shook his head, drawing the words back before they were spoken. Kaylin successfully fought the urge to slap him. “The borders here—can you magnify them? They are not clear.”

“No, Lord Tiamaris, they are not. As I said—and as I imagine you suspect—the boundaries between fiefs are somewhat unstable. What the mirrors show you now is what I see. Do you understand?”

The Dragon Lord offered the fieflord a very graceful nod. “You honor us.”

“It is expedient for me to do so at this time. It is also,” Nightshade added, “no risk to me. What I see, you cannot see without my aid, and could you, you could do nothing with it while I lived.” His smile was slight and cool.

“But here—”

“Yes. I see more and less clearly than I would otherwise see if Barren was stable. But what you see along the blurred edge is accurate. The shadows of the interior have changed shape over even the past decade. They have been on the move—slowly—into the fief of Barren.”

Kaylin frowned.

“You’ve had word from the fieflord of Barren, have you not?” Nightshade asked her softly.

She glanced at Tiamaris, who didn’t seem to be surprised, and gave up. “Yes. But I didn’t understand why. And I still don’t understand why now.” The words sank into the silence that followed them. “It’s gotten worse,” she said, voice flat. “Recently.”

Lord Nightshade said, “It has, as you guess, recently become much more unstable.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. The interior is completely invisible to both my magic and my information network.”

“Do you think it has something to do with the Outcaste Dragon?”

“He was injured, when he retreated from our previous encounter,” Nightshade replied, his voice completely neutral. “The injuries he sustained were not insignificant, and unless he were capable of healing them quickly—” his tone made clear that he thought it highly unlikely “—it is doubtful, to me.”

She slid her hands to her hips, and then let them fall back to her sides. “Nightshade, please—”

“When the tainted Leontines ran into the heart of the fiefs,” he told her softly, “it is just possible that their need and their voices woke something that should not have been woken. This is conjecture, on my part, no more, and for that reason I am hesitant to offer it.”

She swallowed. “I-it can’t be them.” The shakiness of her words failed to convince even Kaylin, and she’d said them. She looked at Tiamaris.

The Dragon Lord said, quietly, “The Eternal Emperor and the Dragon Court have decreed that the child of the tainted is not to be killed. They will not destroy him when they receive word of Lord Nightshade’s conjecture, Kaylin. That much, your service has bought the infant.”

That much, Kaylin thought. She tried to ignore her fear, but fear was hard that way. Swallowing it, she turned back to the mirror. Wondering what might wake in the shadows and the darkness of something that had looked, at first glance, like the rest of the city.

“Tiamaris, what happens if Barren somehow falls?”

“Falls?”

“If the shadows—if the heart of the fief—somehow expands to fill it?”

“You’ve lived in Nightshade,” was his quiet reply. “Your life was informed, in some ways, by the presence of those shadows, whether you knew it or not. The Emperor will hold the city,” he continued, after a pause.

Lord Nightshade raised a brow, but did not comment.

“But it will know ferals, and possibly worse. The Imperial Palace is not what Castle Nightshade is.”

“The High Halls—”

“The Barrani High Halls,” Tiamaris said.

She winced.

“You see the difficulty.”

She did. But she plowed on, regardless. “Could the High Halls hold out against the—the shadows?”

“Almost certainly, given the change in rulership. But it will not happen while the Eternal Emperor still breathes. He will not surrender an inch of his established domain to the Barrani.”

Lord Nightshade nodded. “I can enter Barren,” he told her quietly. “But it is not, then, safe for Nightshade. Not now; there is already too much instability and too much weakness.”

She had lived most of her life under Nightshade’s rule. In no way could she call it either just or fair. But the shadows—in the fiefs, and under the High Halls—would be far, far worse, and she accepted this. Because, she thought bitterly, she lived on the outside, where his law and his casual cruelty had no purchase. For just a moment, the bitterness of that hypocrisy caused her throat to thicken. She swallowed it anyway. Time to move on.

“What borders Barren on the other side?”

“Understand that what I tell you is not fact in the way that Liatt is fact; the fief does not border me. But if information gathered in the fiefs in the usual way can be trusted, Candallar.”

“Will Candallar hold?”

Nightshade said nothing. It was not helpful.

Tiamaris bowed to Nightshade. “I must leave,” he told the fieflord.

Nor did the fieflord appear surprised by the abrupt announcement. “Will you allow the Private to remain for a few moments?”

“I cannot leave without her; the orders I were given were quite…explicit.”

This, too, did not appear to surprise Nightshade. Kaylin felt his amusement, but also his annoyance; they were almost perfectly balanced. His eyes, however, were the emerald green of Barrani calm, with perhaps a hint of blue to deepen the color. “Then escort her,” he told Tiamaris. “She will return.” He offered the briefest of bows to the Dragon Lord. “The information I can surrender in safety, I will. If anything changes along the borders, I will inform Private Neya; she may then inform the Emperor.”

Tiamaris nodded and turned to leave the room, but Lord Nightshade had not quite finished. “Kaylin.”

“Yes?”

“I will not surrender you to Barren.”

Tiamaris did not run back to the bridge. Dragon dignity was good for something. He did, however, walk quickly, and the difference in their relative strides meant that Kaylin’s dignity had to suffer; she had to jog to keep up. Only when they had crossed the bridge itself—with a distant crowd of witnesses who were too curious to clear the streets and too damn smart to approach—did he turn.

“We go to the palace,” he told her.

She nodded; she’d expected that much.

“You are not yet relieved of your duty for the day. Accompany me.”

She nodded again, not that he noticed. “Tiamaris—” she began, as he stepped into the street.

He failed to hear her, which was probably deliberate. Dragons didn’t flag a carriage down; they simply stood in the way and waited for it to stop. This was, in Kaylin’s experience, a risky proposition, but on the other hand, Dragons were built in such a way that if the risk played out poorly it didn’t exactly kill them.