started to head toward the taller outline of Tiamaris.
Sanabalis, however, had decided that waiting wasn’t in the cards. He roared. The two men stiffened, which gave Kaylin a moment of petty satisfaction. Tiamaris turned.
“You’ll have to teach me how to do that,” Kaylin muttered.
“If it were even possible, I would still refuse,” Sanabalis replied. “Lord Diarmat would find it…impertinent.”
Tiamaris parted the crowd of armed strangers by turning. They didn’t rush to get out of his way; they moved. For all their apparent bulk, they moved quickly. As they cleared enough street for a Dragon with folded wings, Kaylin saw Tara. Tara was, in fact, wearing her gardening clothes, and Morse was walking by her side, looking about as happy at this new set of guards as Kaylin felt.
Morse had been a lieutenant of the previous fieflord, but she’d made the transition to Tiamaris without much trouble. Beside Tara, she looked like a thug in the true sense of the word; her hair was still a very short, shorn crop, and her face still bore scars from earlier fights. When she smiled at all, it was a grim, black smile, and it usually meant someone was about to die. Or it had meant that. She did smile at Tara, but usually only when she thought no one else was watching.
Tara broke into a wide grin as Kaylin met her eyes. Kaylin knew that Tara could be aware of her presence the instant she set foot on the right side of the Ablayne, but she often seemed so surprised and delighted, the thought held no weight. She broke into a run, which ended with her arms around Kaylin, and Kaylin’s arms around her.
“Lord Sanabalis said you would come,” Tara said when she at last stepped back. “Hello, Corporal Handred.”
Severn also smiled, and it was an unguarded smile. “Lady,” he said, bowing to the fief’s title, and not the name Kaylin had given her.
“Did he explain the difficulty?” Tara asked.
“No. Now that the fief is Tiamaris’s, he feels any information has to come from Tiamaris.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not a Dragon.” She did add when she heard Sanabalis’s snort, “I think it’s something to do with the etiquette of hoard law. Dragons are, by simple human standards, insanely unreasonable about their hoards.”
“Ah. It’s possible that he is entirely correct then.” She turned and smiled at Sanabalis, who appeared unimpressed with Kaylin’s description. “Thank you.”
He bowed to her. He bowed damn low.
Kaylin raised a brow at Morse, and Morse responded with a pure fief shrug. “What’s happening?” Kaylin asked Morse, stepping to the side to add a little distance between them and anyone who might be listening.
“We have three thousand eight-foot-tall people who can’t speak Elantran and have no place to live. They also have no sense of humor.”
“Neither do you.”
“Exactly. Consider the source of the comment.”
Kaylin chuckled—but she also winced. “Sanabalis implied there were other difficulties.”
“That’s how he worded it? ‘Other difficulties’?” Morse spit to one side.
Kaylin frowned. “How bad is it?”
“There are two problems. One, we’re trying to track down, but even the Lady is having some trouble; we’re not sure why.”
“That would be the subtle Shadow that Sanabalis also mentioned?”
“That’s not what we call it, but yeah. You’re here to help with that?”
Kaylin frowned, and then nodded. “That’s my guess. What’s the other problem?”
“The border boundary,” Morse said, voice flat. There were four possible borders that defined the fief of Tiamaris—but only one was a threat to the fief’s existence: the one that faced into the unclaimed shadow that lay in the center of the fiefs.
Kaylin almost froze. “The border’s supposed to be stable.”
“Oh, it’s holding. If it weren’t, we’d all—all—be dead by now. But the freaking Shadow across the fucking border is puking out whatever it can. Nothing small and easily killed, either; apparently the bigger one-offs can survive the ‘transition’ with some of their power intact.”
Kaylin sucked in air. “When the hells did this start happening?”
“Pretty much the same day they did,” Morse replied, jerking her thumb in the direction of the strangers.
“Believe,” Kaylin said after an uncomfortably sharp silence, “that they didn’t bring the Shadows with them.”
“Oh?”
“If I understood what was said correctly, they were fleeing from them.”
“And being followed.”
“I was there, Morse. If great chunks of Shadowy one-offs had followed them into Elani, believe I would have noticed.” But she hesitated. Morse, no fool, noticed. “What?”
“When they arrived, they did this funny thing with a bunch of drums and a lot of loud chanting. It was supposed to be some sort of purification ritual, but the end result? The Dragons—all four of them—took flight over the city while they did it.” Kaylin shook her head, glancing briefly at two of those four: Tiamaris, in full scales and wings, and Sanabalis, in slightly drab but official clothing. “And…the chanting was magical, somehow.”
This admission of the use of magic by obviously dangerous giants did nothing positive for Morse’s mood.
“But…something answered them. Something in the fiefs. If I had to guess,” she added quietly, “something from the heart of the fiefs.”
“What, it was some kind of fucking challenge?” Morse’s brows rose toward the nearly shaved dome of her head. “Are they insane?”
From a fief perspective, there could only be one answer to that question. But…this fief had become, almost overnight, an exception to the rules that generally governed the fiefs. Kaylin glanced at the large huddle of strangers—she’d have to ask Sanabalis what their own name for their race was because “strangers” wasn’t going to cut it—and said, “Not insane. I think they’re used to fighting a war with the Shadows, rather than locking the doors and praying a bunch.”
“Great.” Morse glanced at Tara, who seemed to be involved in a serious discussion with Sanabalis, while Tiamaris, over her shoulder—well, part of his jaw, at any rate—looked on. Severn was beside the older Dragon, listening intently.
Kaylin frowned.
“What?” Morse said sharply.
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
She was rewarded by something that was halfway between snort and grunt; the sarcastic comment that would have usually followed failed
