Cast in Flight by Michelle Sagara
Kaylin hesitated for a fraction of a second longer, and then shouted, “Mandoran! Tell Helen to mirror the Emperor right now.” She couldn’t hear his response because he was at home—but he’d be watching through Teela’s eyes. At the moment, Teela’s expression gave nothing away. Tain was to her side, a step back; he was armed with the usual Hawk weapon: a stick.
Teela, however, was armed with something a little more substantial.
Oh, hells.
A lot more substantial. Kaylin recognized the sword: it was one of the reputed three Dragonslayers.
Nightshade.
You wish me to pass a message to my brother?
Or to Helen directly. You can see him?
I can see, the fieflord replied, what you face. I will not tell you that discretion is the better part of valor.
Don’t. I lived that life until I was thirteen and I’d sooner die—horribly—than go back to it. And he was a large part of that early fear.
The stone flooring cracked beneath the feet of the Aerian who was not Aerian. Orange-eyed, his smile no longer looked lazy or condescending. But when he breathed again—and he did—he wasn’t aiming at the Arcanist. He wasn’t aiming at the praevolo, either.
He was aiming at Kaylin.
* * *
She stood her ground, not because she was counting on the familiar, but because she was counting on her partner. He’d set the weapon chain into a slow spin, and it had worked its way up to a fast one; it was a wall of chain and blade. She had no doubt that it would stop the fire from reaching her; it had stopped magical fire before.
Fire hit the moving wall and splashed to either side of it. The rock it hit in that splash sizzled. A second breath broke, as well. The third breath wasn’t aimed directly at Kaylin; it was aimed toward the ceiling above Kaylin’s head. The ceiling was a long way up, but given the way the rock had sizzled, she didn’t think it would be any safer than a direct hit.
And then it wasn’t a problem, because Bellusdeo leapt. Something as large as a Dragon, when grounded—and if the cavern was large enough for Aerian flight, it was very, very cramped for Dragon wings—should have been ungainly. Awkward. It shouldn’t have had the grace and suppleness of movement that Bellusdeo displayed.
She had been, she had said, a warrior queen. Kaylin could see why.
The outcaste snapped his wings to either side; they extended, and then extended again, their span far larger than an Aerian’s. They snapped shut on Bellusdeo’s jaws, scraping her scales as if their feathers were made of metal or stone. His guards leapt into the air; they didn’t land. Unlike Bellusdeo, the Aerians didn’t find the cavern too confining for actual combat. They weren’t stupid enough to think they could take on a Dragon.
She reared back, roared, breathed; the outcaste stood in the stream of her fire, his Aerian face upturned as if to meet her gaze. He was still, silent; fire lapped at his wings before sliding off them, just as fire did off Dragon scales. Or Dragon skin.
One of the Aerian guards shouted, “Praevolo!”
He wasn’t talking to Moran.
Chapter 26
That single word made so many things clear. The Aerian guards would not bend knee to Moran; they didn’t recognize her as praevolo. They believed the outcaste was praevolo; to them, Moran was a pretender, a fraud.
The Aerian Hawks maneuvered in the air as they tightened their formation around Moran. They moved, their flight a weave that implied wall. There were drills and flight formations that were characteristic of the Aerian Hawks, and Kaylin recognized them as they fell into place.
The outcaste’s Aerian guards were aiming for Moran, and Kaylin was wingless. There was nothing she could do for the Hawks in the air.
The outcaste lifted wings that were far too large for his current body.
And the familiar roared.
* * *
It was a Dragon roar, it occurred beside Kaylin’s ear, and before she could react, the small creature had propelled himself off her shoulder with enough force to cause a stumble on Kaylin’s part. She lifted a hand to grab him—not the world’s smartest move on a good day, which this wasn’t—and missed.
He headed straight for Bellusdeo, roaring, his minuscule form home to a voice that would have been impressive even from the Emperor.
Bellusdeo drew up short, skidding across the stone floor; her weight gave her a less easily controlled momentum. Given her size, it should have taken her longer to stop. The outcaste’s wings closed in a snap of sound and, oddly, light. The light was multicolored and shifting, as if every color it contained was fighting for dominance. But they closed inches from her Draconic face.
When the outcaste spoke, he spoke in pure Dragon; the world shook. The air moved. Bellusdeo reared up, and up again as her wings spread; she answered in kind.
The caverns took their voices, magnified them, sent them bouncing against the walls and the ceiling. And if Kaylin couldn’t understand the words, she almost understood the tone of them.
The outcaste was offering Bellusdeo something. Kaylin wasn’t entirely certain that the closing of his great wings had been meant to harm her; she thought it might have been meant to restrain her, to hold her in place, while he spoke. The intervention of the familiar meant that there were no restraints; she reared, and her left wing clipped a low-flying Aerian—but not a Hawk. The Aerian in question was thrown against the closest wall, and did not immediately rise again.
She had always understood that Dragons were death, but on a visceral level, Bellusdeo was just...Bellusdeo, to Kaylin. It was jarring, to watch her so casually dispose of a random enemy as if he were a fly. Or a mosquito.
Severn eyed the Aerians; he continued to spin the chain, but shifted the direction of the spinning wall as he made his way to the only other people who were trapped on the ground: Teela and Tain. Teela was eyeing the sky with frank apprehension, which also surprised Kaylin.
It shouldn’t have. She gripped a dagger in hands that were locked with tension, and turned away from the Dragons and the Aerians that were in the air. One Aerian wasn’t.
The Aerian Arcanist stood behind Teela. He hadn’t once attempted to fly. Kaylin had thought, initially, that his choice to walk might be political—the act of a gracious host. Now she wasn’t so certain. He was pale, his blue eyes narrowed; he looked, as she approached him, like he’d had way too much to drink and way too little time to sleep it off.
The familiar roared again. Neither Bellusdeo nor the outcaste responded as his voice rebounded off stone walls, stone heights; nor did they respond as he turned, at last, toward the entrance of the Aerie, flapping in place while the shadows of Aerians cut across his small body.
Limned in a kind of white nimbus, two familiar figures joined him: Mandoran and Annarion. They hovered a moment in the air, wingless but weightless, before they caught sight of Kaylin and Severn. They both avoided meeting Teela’s gaze, which was pretty much all glare. Or at least that’s what Kaylin assumed they were doing. She was wrong, as it happened. They were staring at the outcaste.
And the outcaste turned the attention that had been focused so completely on Bellusdeo toward the two new arrivals. He fell silent, then; utterly silent. His wings stilled. He might have been made of flesh-colored stone, he moved so little.
Mandoran gained instant weight; Annarion lost it. They parted in midair as a focused beam of dark fire erupted across the exact position they had previously occupied. The outcaste’s eyes were red, his expression wild as he breathed again; he forgot the Aerians, or perhaps didn’t care about their survival.
She understood that he wouldn’t care about the Hawks—they were too mortal and slight to damage him without preparation. But the Aerians that had served him, the Aerians that had called him praevolo, were caught in the tail of this oddly colored flame, and it devoured them in an instan
And as it did, the outcaste grew in size.
He had not shed his Aerian form, although his wings were almost Draconic at this point. They still had feathers, but the feathers glimmered as if metallic, as if scales had somehow been warped and transformed in a very specific way.
Kaylin turned toward Teela and the Arcanist who sheltered behind her.
“I told them not to come.” The Barrani Hawk didn’t shrug; her jaw was set in a very hard line, her eyes were almost indigo. Tain looked pained at their arrival, but not surprised, or rather, not surprised at them. He was worried about Teela.
So was the outcaste, because Teela drew her very big sword. Kaylin could almost hear the sword’s name in the scrape of metal leaving sheath; it felt syllabic. The Barrani Hawk, the only one who was a Lord of the High Court, stepped forward, away from the Arcanist; her partner did the same.
Kaylin took her place. There wasn’t a lot she could do about Dragons, Dragon outcastes or winged combat; the Hawks weren’t generally supplied with ranged weaponry, and even if they were, her ability to draw a bow or aim it was laughable, if one took the weaponsmaster at his word.
Bellusdeo roared.
The outcaste roared—and breathed.
The familiar added his voice to theirs.
Mandoran, damn it, laughed.
And Kaylin turned to the Arcanist. “You can’t fly, can you?” she asked.
* * *
The Arcanist was stiff, silent, possessed of the natural hauteur that came from a life of power and a lack of privation. It had clearly been dented badly sometime in the recent past.
“I have wings.”
“Yes—but they’re not doing anything. You can’t fly.”
A whistle sounded in the air above and behind them; it was high and piercing, which it pretty much needed to be to be heard over the Dragons.
“What,” the Aerian demanded of Kaylin, “did you bring here?”
She laughed, although most of what fueled that laughter was tension and outrage. “You’re asking that of me? You have a Dragon outcaste who lives in Ravellon in your Aerie—in your personal damn guard—and you’re asking that of me?”
“They’ll destroy the landing,” he replied. As a reply, it sucked.
“Fine. Bellusdeo won’t let us fall.”
She wouldn’t bet much on his chances. Neither, apparently, would he. He appeared to be making a decision. “No. I cannot fly. My powers have been curtailed, of late.”
“Because Moran has the bracelet.”
He said nothing, but tensed. The outcaste roared.
And the roar that answered was not, in fact, Bellusdeo’s. The great shadow of the Emperor’s indigo form intercepted all the natural light that normally poured into the mouth of the cave. Kaylin didn’t need to look to see that his eyes—which were the size of her head—were a bloodred.
They were the same color, after all, as Bellusdeo’s.
* * *
“We must retreat,” the Arcanist said. Out and down were much closer than in, at this point—but none of them could fly. “The Emperor is not going to be happy to see your confederate’s sword.”
“Probably not,” Kaylin replied. “But it’s not like he doesn’t know she owns it. And she’s not going to be his big concern at the moment.”
No. That was reserved for the outcaste, who at last shed the Aerian form and its resultant wings. He seemed to absorb all darkness, all natural shadow in the cavern, as he shifted into the Draconic form; he was ebony to the Emperor’s indigo and Bellusdeo’s gold.
The Aerians who had served him froze for a moment—but only a moment. Clearly, he had never gone full Dragon in their sight before. But their faith in him, such as it was, appeared to be unshaken. They obviously believed he was capable of miracles.
They had called him praevolo.
He wasn’t. That was owned by Moran.
“You can’t fly,” Kaylin once again said to the Arcanist. “How far can you run?”
The Arcanist wasn’t stupid. As the Emperor roared, as the outcaste roared back, he answered in the only practical way possible. He ran. Kaylin wasn’t far behind; Severn took and held the rear. The weapon chain could interrupt Dragon fire; when the wall was spinning, there wasn’t much in the way of magic that could get through it.
The one great thing about having Dragons and Barrani as friends? They were far, far less likely to die than Kaylin herself. She could, without guilt, worry about her own survival when the breathing started.
“You are so boring,” a familiar voice said as Mandoran stepped into the hall. He raised one brow. “We’re going to have problems,” he continued, as if he were talking about light afternoon rain.
“More problems than outcaste Dragons?”
“Well, no. But...”
“Mandoran. If you’ve got something to say, say it now.”
“He’s more like us.”
She almost tripped over her feet.
“I mean, not like us, exactly. But...he’s a Dragon the way we’re Barrani.” He winced. “Sorry. Sedarias is pissed off. Also, she hates it when I think in Elantran. Speak in Elantran,” he amended. He winced again. “She says I don’t think at all.”
Kaylin had only briefly met Sedarias, and was grateful that Sedarias was in the West March and not here. On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine the composed, regal and controlled Barrani woman making a hash of things. Or getting stuck in a wall.
“Skip the reasons Sedarias thinks you’re an idiot, or we’ll be here all day. What is he doing?”
“Annarion is trying to head him off—but he can move the way we move, and, um, he’s had more practice at it.”
“You did it for centuries.”
“Yes—then. But we didn’t have to come back. We didn’t have to interact with the rest of the world or its many cages. He does, and can. He can do it much more easily than we can.”
“Meaning he won’t get stuck in walls.”
Mandoran grimaced. “Not accidentally, no.”
“Why did you say we’ve got a problem?”
“Because he’s clearly been here for a while.” This time, Mandoran turned to the Arcanist, who was ash gray. Or maybe gray-green. In either case, the colors didn’t suit anyone who wasn’t already dead.
Kaylin was not slow. “What are we facing?”
“How well do you fly?”
“Not at all.”
“Then you’re facing imminent disaster. The whole of the floor here—beneath our feet—is permeable. It exists in a state similar to us.”
The Arcanist, however, said, “There was a reason I wished to retreat. If you can shut up for five minutes, you will be in less danger of imminent disaster.”
* * *
They ran.
“Annarion is informing Bellusdeo of the danger. Bellusdeo will tell the Emperor.” Mandoran frowned and added, “Annarion doesn’t mind the Dragon we live with. I think he still holds a grudge against the Eternal Emperor. Where’s small and squawky?”
“With the rest of the Dragons.”
“I think you want him with you.” Mandoran had stopped just short of the arch that led to another room. There was no door; in general, the Aeries had few closed doors.
Her skin, and the marks that adorned most of it, didn’t react as if magic was present. The Arcanist crossed the threshold before he staggered to a stop. He considered this room safe. And it probably was, if you were the Arcanist.
“Mandoran?”
“The room should be safe for you.” His voice was dead neutral, his expression unusually grim. “I’ve spent enough of this week trapped in a wall—and that was my own fault. If it’s all the same to you, I’m not going to fall to my death if the floors become brittle, porous or nonexistent.??
“If Teela is telling you to stay with me, tell her to bite me.”
“She says she’d rather slap you, but can’t oblige at the moment.” He was staring through the arch at the Arcanist, who had unfolded from a stumbling crouch. In this room, he looked like Kaylin expected an Arcanist would: his natural arrogance reasserted itself.
Kaylin turned to the Arcanist. “You sent the man to talk to Margot.” It wasn’t a question.
The Arcanist nodded. There was a mirror at his back; it was a tall, rectangular mirror whose surface was entirely reflective.
“The mirror has no connection to the outer world,” the Arcanist said before she could ask. “It does not connect, in any way, to the mirror lattice.”
“Let me guess. It’s not secure enough for you.”
He nodded again, his expression betraying a flicker of surprise. “I sent the man, as you call him, to talk to Margot, yes.”
“And you sent him with the bracelet, the collar, the feather.”
“Yes.”
“Which you shouldn’t have had.”
“Not even the pretender could wear that bracelet for long,” the Arcanist replied with a thin, sharp smile. “He could wear it, however, and he did, when he quietly made the claim that he was praevolo. He claimed to be illegitimate, as Moran dar Carafel is. As proof of that claim, he was tested—but the test was private, and witnessed by only a handful of the Court. The bracelet did not destroy him, but he was unwilling to wear it for long; he did not wish, he said, to cause a civil war. He did not have the wings; Moran did. It is my belief that the wearing did harm him, but I came to it slowly.”
“How long has he been considered praevolo?”
The Arcanist took time to reply; he was clearly moving into a political mind-set. “Just under a year.”
“You knew he wasn’t.”
“No, Private, I did not.” This was said with more vehemence. Kaylin was genuinely surprised. Arcanists weren’t generally given to superstitious or religious thought, and in many ways, that’s what the praevolo seemed to engender.