and toss it in.” The bracer was not an optional piece of equipment; it was mandatory. It confined Kaylin’s magic. She even did most of her lessons with Sanabalis wearing it, although when he was frustrated, he had her remove it and lay it on the table beside the offending, and unlit, candle.
Severn laughed, then. It was one of Kaylin’s favorite things to do with the bracer, when she was in a mood. Because it was ancient and because no one understood how it functioned—or at least that was the official story—no one knew why it chose a Keeper; it had chosen, not Kaylin, but Severn. When she tossed it in the river, it appeared—sometimes dripping—in Severn’s home. He told her it was making the carpets moldy.
“I don’t think we’re going to run into any trouble. Not in Nightshade.”
He said nothing, and she lifted her hand to the mark on her cheek. He glanced away, then turned and caught her wrist. “Stay in Nightshade, Kaylin.”
The only way she now lied to Severn was by omission. She said nothing until he let her wrist go. But when he did, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be careful,” she told him. “Please don’t threaten Tiamaris.”
He raised a brow.
“Oh, please, do if it will amuse you,” the slightly irritated Dragon Lord added. “I’m collecting threats today.” He paused. “But for the sake of variety, attempt to be either more dire—or more original—than one Dragon Lord, one Leontine, and one Aerian.”
Kaylin winced. “I’m not a child,” she told Tiamaris stiffly. “I don’t know why—”
“I do,” was his grim reply. “And while I would like to discuss the relative states of our respective maturity, I would like to do it from the safety of the other side of the Ablayne.”
“Safety?” Kaylin muttered as she lengthened her stride as far as it would go and still failed to match Tiamaris’s headlong walk.
“The Halls of Law have no purchase in the fiefs,” was his reply. “There, they only have an Outcaste Barrani, an Outcaste Dragon, and a handful of overly ambitious ferals.”
The sun had completely cleared the horizon when Tiamaris and Kaylin reached the bridge that crossed the Ablayne into Nightshade. Kaylin had never quite understood why the Emperor allowed the bridge, which was clearly in decent repair, to remain standing. While it was true that people did cross it, it was also true that some of those people went in the wrong direction, just as Kaylin and Tiamaris were now doing.
This was not the only bridge across the river, of course; it was not even the only bridge out of the fiefs that Kaylin had ever crossed. But it had defined many of her early dreams in the fief of Nightshade, and she always approached it as if it were a doorway between the present and the past. She did so now, but she was aware that Tiamaris, who had slowed enough to allow her forced jog to keep up, had had no such dreams.
“What are we looking for?” she asked Tiamaris.
He glanced at her, and then slowed to a walk, as if the weight of the bridge’s symbolism had finally reached his feet. “Borders,” he told her quietly. “I know that Evanton is known to you as something other than the Keeper, but his words—if you relayed them with any accuracy—are significant to the Eternal Emperor. They would be significant, as well, to any of the fieflords.”
“You want to talk to Nightshade.” She turned and after a pause, rested her elbows on the rails. Strands of dark hair curled gently around her cheeks as she bent over the river itself. It was never still; it reflected nothing.
He surprised her. “I want nothing from Nightshade, fief or Lord. I admit that I find the fieflord slightly…irritating. But he is not my Outcaste; he is Barrani.”
“You just don’t like his sword.”
One glance at Tiamaris told her that she’d failed to annoy him; his eyes were still a lambent gold. The lower membranes were, however, raised. “I don’t, as you quaintly put it, care for his sword, no. But he is Nightshade. And if the heart of the fiefs is contained at all, it is contained by the fiefs as they stand. What lies in Ravellon will not determine the shape—or strength—of Nightshade’s border while Lord Nightshade rules.
“And nothing you say, or do here, will change that fact. I am not here, nor was I sent here, to speak with Lord Nightshade.”
“Then what—”
“The Keeper’s message was, in its entirety, yours. I am here,” he told her, “to act as your guard should the need arise. That is my only function at the present time. If you feel it is wise or germane, you will travel to Lord Nightshade’s castle, and you will speak with him; if you feel it is neither, you will not. I will go where you go.”
“Yes,” she told him, after a long pause. “Nightshade. If for no other reason than that we’ll be nosing around his fief on the edge of a border neither of us particularly wants to see again.” She glanced at him, and then headed down the slope of the bridge. “You know he’d send word if the Outcaste Dragon came anywhere near Nightshade.”
“He has not historically proven himself to be entirely aware of the Outcaste,” was the slightly cool reply.
“He doesn’t have to be. It’s in his interests to have the two of you fight; it saves him both time and the effort of finding new men.”
When he glanced at her pointedly, she shrugged. “Well,” she said, kicking a small stone, “it makes sense to me.”
CHAPTER 6
Lord Nightshade was waiting for them.
This surprised neither Kaylin nor Tiamaris. The small mark on Kaylin’s cheek, which was regularly mistaken as a tattoo by anyone who wasn’t Barrani or hadn’t been racially warring with them for way too many years, was in fact his mark. Kaylin was still hazy on the details of what, exactly, it signified, but she understood two things about it: removing it would generally involve removing her head, and it acted as a conduit, in some ways, between Kaylin and the Lord of the fief of Nightshade.
She generally went out of her way not to think about the rest.
Lord Nightshade was not, of course, considerate enough to wait outside Castle Nightshade. This meant that both Kaylin and Tiamaris—the latter with somewhat chilly, if respectful, permission from the Barrani guards—were forced to enter the castle through its nefarious and much-cursed portal. The portal looked very much like a lowered portcullis. It wasn’t. It was a magical gate that led directly into the front foyer of the Castle, in which Nightshade greeted his guests.
Unfortunately for Kaylin, her sensitivity to magic made the passage extremely disorienting and difficult, and she usually ended up on the other side on her hands and knees, trying very hard not to throw up. Today was, sadly, no exception.
Tiamaris never seemed remotely fazed by the transition—but he was a Dragon; you could probably cut off one of his arms with a nail file and he wouldn’t do more than grimace. He was, however, accustomed to Kaylin’s vastly less-dignified entrance, and bent to offer her a hand when she at last lifted her head. She only did this when the room had stopped spinning.
Lord Nightshade was waiting at a polite distance. He nodded as she gained her feet. “Kaylin,” he said, inclining his head. “Lord Tiamaris.”
“Lord Nightshade.” The Dragon Lord extended the fieflord a precise bow. He didn’t hold it long, but it was in tone and texture a very correct one.
“I was expecting you,” Lord Nightshade told Kaylin softly, “a day ago.”
She grimaced. She certainly hadn’t expected to end up here, but her life was like that.
After a pause, Lord Nightshade turned and indicated, with the gesture of a hand, that they were to follow. Her knees still slightly wobbling, she did; it didn’t pay to lag behind Nightshade in this castle. The halls had a tendency to change direction—and orientation—for anyone who wasn’t