Cast in Flight by Michelle Sagara
She saluted as she entered and came to stiff, almost vibrating, attention.
“What,” he asked, hierarchical preamble forgotten, “has happened?” He didn’t say what did you do this time, but his tone—and his glare—implied it. He didn’t give her permission to relax her stance, and she considered remaining at attention, but he sounded annoyed and very tired.
She told him as concisely as she could, staring at a spot just past his left shoulder.
“...I see. I believe you have a visitor,” he added.
The familiar came fluttering down through the open aperture to land more or less on her shoulder.
“Did you have something to do with the current emergency?” the Hawklord asked the small dragon. The small dragon huffed, squawked and settled.
“That’s a yes,” Kaylin translated.
“Did you ask him to intervene?”
“No, sir.”
“He did it on his own?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Invisible Aerians. Shadow nets.”
“Moran said—” She reddened, and corrected herself. “Sergeant Carafel said that we’ve got no proof they meant to kill her.” She hesitated, and then added, “It’s possible the net was meant to slow the Dragon down. Last time—”
“I am aware of what occurred.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Very well. Have the Barrani thoroughly inspect the injured before they are relayed.”
“Why don’t we just send them to the cells? We can offer medical help there if it’s required.”
“What a clever, intelligent idea. I’m certain it’s one that would never have occurred to any of your commanding officers on their own.”
Kaylin kissed corporal goodbye for another promotion cycle.
“Join the Barrani in their inspection,” he continued. “If you notice anything out of the ordinary, report it immediately. To me,” he added.
Marcus was not going to like that.
* * *
Severn met her in the office as she headed to the front doors, and fell in beside her. She filled him in as she jogged. He stopped to unwind his weapon chain. When spinning, it was proof against a lot of magic. Among other things. He caught up as she hit the streets. The Barrani had clearly been alerted by mirror before she’d made it down the Tower stairs. Teela was there, as was another of the human women—Rakkia. Tain and Rakkia’s partner stood back, armed and silent.
Teela met Kaylin’s eyes, shook her head slightly. Rakkia said, more pragmatically, “I see nothing.” She stepped out of the way as Kaylin approached the Aerians and stopped.
“What—what did you do?” she whispered at her familiar. She might have shouted, but for the moment, shock had robbed her voice of strength.
The familiar crooned. He set a wing, gentle this time, against her eyes.
She saw nothing at all out of the ordinary. No Shadow. No weird nets. No strange armor. But she saw normal wings. The familiar lowered his wing, and she saw very damaged wings. She’d seen Aerian wings take injury before. This was nothing like that.
“Kitling.”
Ignoring this, she poked the familiar, who lifted his wing again, sighing loudly enough to tickle her ear. The familiar then lowered his wing as she approached the Aerians. They were male, and given their build, younger than most of the Aerian Hawks; they hadn’t developed the training muscles the Hawks had. They were shades of brown, paler than Clint, and their eyes were decidedly blue, but no surprise there.
They were conscious, but mostly silent, except for weeping. The weeping made them seem younger than they probably were; they huddled together in pain. Or in terror. She wanted them to be terrified for one long minute. She was certain that the net they’d carried would have done Bellusdeo or Moran no good whatsoever.
But she’d always had a problem with tears.
“They’ve spoken some Aerian.”
“Anything intelligible?”
“Yes and no.” She glanced at the Aerians who were almost literally hovering on the periphery of a wide circle. “They’re terrified. They’re begging us not to take their wings. More or less. I didn’t understand the last phrase. Clint translated.”
Kaylin cringed.
“Half the Hawks are disgusted.” By which she meant the Aerian Hawks, because the Barrani Hawks were clearly all disgusted. “Are they clean?”
Kaylin hesitated.
“You’d better be certain they’ve got no magic on them,” Teela said. “And soon. The Hawklord is probably going to descend any minute now, and he’s not in the mood to have to wait for answers.”
“He told me to report to him directly if there was a problem.”
“Yes. Directly will be to his face in probably three minutes or less.”
* * *
Kaylin took advantage of the three minutes, focusing on her work. She did find time to utter a loud Leontine phrase, but that was as natural as breathing. The familiar squawked at her, and she sighed. “Yes, please.”
He obligingly lifted one wing in what was almost a caress. Or a sympathetic pat on the head. He covered only one eye. She looked through both, closing one or the other as it became necessary.
In winged view, the Aerians looked normal. They were obviously in some pain, but given what they had probably been attempting, she considered that deserved. It was the unwinged view that was disturbing. They were missing feathers. They were missing some essential parts of their winged anatomy. She didn’t know very much about the anatomy of wings, but these ones didn’t appear to be recently injured. There’s no way they could have flown with them. “Clint.”
He came to her, wary now. She hated it. She understood it—he’d made it perfectly clear—but she hated it. It made her aware of the vast gulf that separated them; the Hawk they wore wasn’t enough to bridge it. Not today.
“Can they fly?”
He looked at the ruins of their wings. “In an emergency, they could land,” he finally said. “They cannot fly.” But his expression was shuttered; it was wrong. There was pity, yes, but something else, as well.
She studied their wings through the wing of the familiar. She looked at the feathers, the ridges of their wings, the things that were missing in this world. She turned to look back at Clint; he looked the same when viewed through either eye.
Frowning, she asked, “Clint—could they ever fly?”
“...I’m not a doctor. But no. No, I don’t think so.”
Kaylin glanced up at Teela. “I wish Mandoran were here.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Tain snapped. He might have said more, but Teela turned to look at him, and he fell silent. If it was a grudging silence, it didn’t matter.
“I believe he sees what you see. It’s not, however, standard magic.”
Bellusdeo, silent until then, said, “It is Shadow magic.”
* * *
Teela was right. The Hawklord landed five seconds later. He barely glanced at Teela, but did demand a report. The Barrani Hawk’s voice was toneless as she described the events she’d personally seen. Since she’d more or less seen nothing until the familiar had taken to the sky, her part was pretty simple. But the Aerians had appeared shortly thereafter, struggling to stay aloft, all thoughts of possible assassination or capture forgotten in their desperation to touch down the right way.
The Hawklord approached them.
The two huddled together like frightened children. “How,” he demanded, “were you able to fly?” He spoke in Aerian, his voice a crack of brief thunder. His eyes were blue; they matched the eyes of his prisoners.
The prisoners remained silent, their wings—what remained of them—drawn tightly to their backs in either fear or deference. Or both, since one was often a product of the other. It was clear that they had no intention of answering.
Silence again. Other Aerians had joined the Hawks on the ground, and one or two were looking at the prisoners the way Clint had—but not all of them. Interesting. Clint knew, or thought he knew. But so did the Hawklord. She wondered how political this was all going to get.
“Are they a threat in their present condition?” the Hawklord demanded. The general consensus among those who could detect telltale traces of magic was no. The Hawklord therefore turned to Kaylin, blue-eyed, almost quivering with what Kaylin assumed was rage. She had never seen his wings so combat ready, so rigid, as they were now. No wonder the two men were terrified.
Kaylin said, “I think they’re safe.”
The familiar whiffled.
“Is that a yes or a no?” she asked him as quietly as she could, and with no hope at all that it would go unnoticed.
“You are hesitating.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
The familiar lowered his wing and hissed. He was laughing.
“I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” Kaylin began. “But...you know how the familiar’s wing works, right? Well, according to what I’m seeing through his wing...there’s nothing wrong with the wings of these Aerians.”
“And as a healer?”
Chapter 7
Kaylin blinked. This was not a subject that came up often, and never in full view of the rank and file, unless the only rank and file present was Kaylin herself. She swallowed. She looked at the terrified Aerians and had no desire at all to touch them.
“Can you ascertain whether or not what you see is relevant to us?”
She swallowed.
“Private.”
Rolling up her sleeve, she exposed the ancient bracer that had been a gift—a dire, mandatory gift—from the Imperial Court years ago. She wasn’t, in theory, allowed to take it off. In practice, it inhibited the use of the magic that had become hers when the marks that covered so much of her skin had first appeared.
The Emperor who had issued the orders was in the Imperial Palace. The man who was responsible for her livelihood was standing a couple of feet away, wings spread and eyes a study in fury. She took the bracer off. Severn took it before she could toss it over her shoulder.
The captive Aerians regarded her with both hostility and fear. At the moment, she deserved it. She wondered if this was how the Tha’alani felt. Healing was not supposed to be invasive or unwanted.
Clint came with her, as did Severn; weapons were leveled at the Aerian prisoners, the warning in their presence clear, but unspoken.
She reached out and very gently placed a hand on the forehead of the slightly older man. His wings were as they appeared through normal vision. They weren’t the result of an old injury. They were his body’s actual shape.
Kaylin couldn’t give sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf, unless either condition was caused by an injury that had occurred fairly recently. She withdrew her hand and touched the second man, who was staring up at her in misery. Like the first man’s, his wings were complete in their damaged form.
These two hadn’t flown in a long time, if ever. Until today.
“They’re clean.” She turned to the Dragon. “Whatever you sense, I don’t. Shadow?”
“Not now, no. But it was faintly tangible when they were invisible.” Her eyes were a very vivid orange; they hadn’t yet descended into red, but it was a close thing. Bellusdeo’s experience with Gilbert had softened some of the edge of her hatred of Shadow—but it was a pretty hard edge, and the blunting wasn’t terribly obvious at the moment.
“Is it possible that the Shadow formed wings?”
“Clearly. You think the wings are still present.”
“Yes, but I don’t understand how. Maybe it’s an afterimage, an aftereffect.”
“Lord Bellusdeo.” The Hawklord’s terse voice interrupted what might have become a rather long-winded theoretical magic discussion. “Do you feel that the threat of Shadow incursion is present? The Halls are very heavily protected against magic we understand, but they are not a Tower otherwise.”
“I wouldn’t take the risk,” Bellusdeo replied in Elantran. “Would you have any objections if I roasted them for the sake of certainty?”
“Yes. You consider it an actual risk?”
“I consider it a theoretical risk. Shadow magic is chaotic and unpredictable; we could defend against much of it, but it’s always more inventive when it pairs itself with the living.” She looked vaguely disgusted. She didn’t, however, breathe fire.
The Hawklord appeared to be considering a matrix of unpleasant possibilities. “Very well. Take them to the holding cells.”
* * *
“Weren’t you supposed to be in the infirmary?” Teela asked the gold Dragon once the Hawklord was safely out of hearing range.
“I considered this to be the greater danger to Moran,” Bellusdeo replied. “Also, I’m not on the payroll.”
“Fair enough.”
Kaylin glanced at Clint. Some of the other Aerians’ eyes had shaded into a more natural gray. Not Clint. His eyes were still blue. He wasn’t as angry—or as combat-ready—as the Hawklord had been, but he was close. Kaylin wondered if anyone was going to use the front doors today if they had any other choice. She certainly wouldn’t.
Kaylin, Bellusdeo and Severn made their way to the infirmary and found Moran behind a locked door. The door was unlocked after some muffled conversation, which, on Moran’s part, included a few choice Leontine phrases.
Kaylin forgot what she’d been about to say when she saw Moran’s eyes. They were a pale shade of blue, too dark to be gray in any light. It was a color she hadn’t seen all that much of until after the attack on the High Halls; she knew it now as sorrow, the natural response when people you respected and fought beside had perished.
Moran said quietly, “I’ve applied for a leave of absence.”
It almost broke Kaylin’s heart. Her mind, however, was still intact. “Did you recognize them?” she asked.
Moran said nothing.
“Kaylin,” the Dragon said, putting an arm around the Hawk’s shoulder. “Perhaps now is not the time.”
But the answer was clearly yes. “They’re in the holding cells,” she told Moran. “Unless the Caste Court demands their release, that’s where they’re probably going to be staying. Moran—who are they?”
“I don’t know them personally,” she replied, ill at ease. “And it’s going to be complicated for the Caste Court now. If the existence of Shadow spell or augmentation is proven, the Emperor will...not be pleased.”
“The Emperor.”
“The Emperor who created the laws of exemption, yes. There are strict limits to those laws, and for reasons that are obvious, they don’t apply to the use of, or the contamination of, Shadow.”
Bellusdeo said a single word—in native Dragon. It was only one, but Kaylin’s ears were ringing, and the rest of her body was shaking. Dragon was simply not useful for communicating with people who didn’t have ears of stone or steel.
The familiar squawked at the Dragon in mild annoyance. Kaylin lifted a hand—quickly—to cover the familiar’s mouth. “No more native Dragon,” she told Bellusdeo. “I actually need my ears.” To Moran, she said, “The Emperor is coming to dinner tomorrow.”
The blue of sorrow gave way to the purple of surprise, which then gave way to a bluish gray that was probably as calm as her eyes were going to get this morning.
“If you take a leave of absence, will you stay with Helen?”
Silence.
“Because if you think you’re going back to the Southern Reach, you can forget it.”
“Kaylin,” Bellusdeo said in warning.
Kaylin folded her arms. “If there’s Shadow in
“Thank you,” was Moran’s somewhat sarcastic reply.
“But Shadow doesn’t generally pick and choose. These Aerians—the ones in the holding cells—are involved. Do you honestly think that other Aerians won’t be? If you’re with Helen, nothing can hurt you—but all the attempts will be concentrated on Helen. No one within her walls is going to fall to Shadow. No one is going to become collateral damage. If you’re in the Aerie—”
Moran lifted a hand. “Those Aerians are already collateral damage.”
“I think they had some choice in the matter.”
“Do you?”
Kaylin started to speak. Stopped.
“Did you have a choice when you were thirteen?” Moran continued.
Silence. Kaylin hated the reminder of the life she’d left behind. She hated the reminder of the harm she’d done in both desperation and fear. The only thing she’d seen was the need to survive, and survival had been brutal and ugly. Only when she’d given up entirely on survival—when life itself had become so crushingly ugly she believed she was better off dead—had she changed.
It hadn’t been an act of courage.
It had been the ultimate act of despair. And even then she hadn’t had the determination to end her own life. She had come here, to the Halls of Law, with every expectation that her life would be ended for her.
“...No,” Kaylin finally said. “Not if I wanted to survive.” She wanted to turn and leave—it’s what she would have done a handful of years ago. She was awash in that particular form of self-loathing that was guilt. But she shouldered the weight; she’d started this, even asked for it in some fashion. “I expected better of the Aeries than the fiefs.”
At that, Moran sucked in air, and Kaylin winced; she’d spoken the truth, but not with any particular care. “Frightened people,” the older Aerian eventually said, “are the same everywhere. It looks different, but it’s not.” She turned away. Turned back. “But your point is taken. If my leave of absence is granted, I’ll remain with Helen.” She then looked past Kaylin to Severn. “Are my services going to be required?”