so much more than a mortal could achieve in an entire lifetime, it negated mortal experience.
Kaylin didn’t like being treated like a child in the best of circumstances—no one did—but Immortals always felt they were dealing with children when mortals were involved. Some were just way better at hiding it. Diarmat clearly couldn’t be bothered. She waited, and he returned to the paper beneath his hands and began to write. She could actually read upside-down writing; it was one of the things she’d figured out when boredom had taken hold in her early classes and she was trying to be less obvious about it. But in this case, she had a suspicion he’d notice, and it seemed career limiting.
She was also no longer a bored student; she was here as a Hawk, not a mascot. She left her hands loosely by her sides, and stared at a point just past his left shoulder while she waited for some instruction—to sit, to stand, to go away, to answer questions. Anything.
What felt like half an hour later she was still standing in front of his damn desk, and he was still writing. He had told her nothing at all about the rules that governed the Imperial Court or its meetings. He hadn’t spoken of any particular style of dress, hadn’t given her any information about forms of address, hadn’t demonstrated any of the salutes or bows with which one might open speech. Since she’d managed to eat something on the hurried walk over, her stomach didn’t embarrass her by speaking when she wouldn’t.
At the end of the page, he looked up. Folding the paper in three he reached for wax, and this, he melted by the simple expedient of breathing on it slightly. He then pressed a small seal into what had fallen on the seam. He reached across the desk and handed her the letter. “This,” he said, “is for the perusal of Lord Grammayre on the morrow.” He rose, and made his way out from behind his bastion of a desk; there, he exhaled. It was loud.
“Very well,” he said, as if he was vaguely disappointed. “You have some ability to display patience. Your posture is not deplorable. Your ability to comport yourself does not directly affect the respect in which the Halls of Law are now held.” He spoke in crisp, perfectly enunciated High Barrani. He now opened a drawer, and a thick sheaf of papers appeared on the desk.
These, Kaylin thought, would be the various educational reports he had barely, in his own words, perused.
He handed them to her; she slid the letter to the Hawklord into her tunic, and took the offending pile, glancing briefly at what lay on top of it. Transcripts, yes. To her surprise, the first one was not a classroom diatribe from a frustrated or angry teacher.
“This is a case report,” she said before she could stop herself.
“It is.” He walked around to her side. “Do you recognize it?”
She nodded.
“You were working in concert with two Barrani Hawks.”
“Teela and Tain,” she said. She didn’t flip through the report; she knew which case this was. All boredom or irritation fled, then.
“It was, I believe, the breaking of a child-prostitution ring.”
“It was.”
“Do you recall the chain of events that led to the deaths of some of the men involved?”
She nodded again, although it was almost untrue: she didn’t remember the end clearly at all. She remembered her utter, unstoppable rage. And she remembered the deaths that rage—and her unbridled magic—had caused.
His silence could have meant many things, but since his face was as expressive as cold stone, she didn’t bother to look at him.
“I would like you to peruse the rest of the documents,” he finally said.
She did. It wasn’t a small pile—although it wasn’t Leontine in proportion—but there really weren’t that many cases in which she’d lost control of her inexplicable magic to such devastating effect; she had literally skinned a man alive. She didn’t regret it. Not in any real way. He would have died anyway, after his trial. But…the trial had been moot, and Marcus had not been happy.
The next report made her right hand tighten into a white-knuckled fist before she got halfway down the first page. It wasn’t a case report. It wasn’t a report that the Halls of Law would ever generate.
It was, instead, a report on the Guild of Midwives. She almost dropped the report on the desk. Instead, she forced her hand to relax—as much as it could—while she read. It detailed all the emergency call-ins she’d done—and it detailed, in some cases, the results. She lifted the top page. Her memory wasn’t the best, but she thought, looking briefly at dates and commentary, none in a hand she recognized, that it was more complete than anything she could have written for him, had he asked.
Grim, she flipped through the pile, and was unsurprised to see that he also had a similar report for each visit she’d made to Evanton’s shop on Elani street. This angered her less; she knew the Dragon Court spied on Evanton.
There was a brief report of her visits to the High Halls, again not much to fuss about; there was a report on every visit she had made in recent months to the fiefs—any fief crossing. There was a report that followed her movements to, and from, both the Leontine Quarter and the Tha’alani Quarter. Diarmat was silent as she read, as if waiting for a reaction she didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing.
But the final report was of the Foundling Hall.
CHAPTER 2
It took all the self-control Kaylin had ever mastered not to crumple the document into a ball and throw it. She couldn’t even read it, although her eyes grazed the words, recognizing dates and familiar names.
“So,” Diarmat said in his cool, clipped voice. She forced herself to meet his gaze—or she tried. He wasn’t looking at her face; he was staring, inner membranes fully extended, at her wrist. She glanced at it. The gems on the bracer she wore were flashing brightly enough that they could be clearly seen through layers of clothing.
The lights cut through her anger as if they were a cold, cold dagger.
Get a grip, she told herself. It’s a piece of paper. It’s just another damn piece of paper. It’s not like all the rest of the reports didn’t make clear that the Court had followed every damn move she’d made for years; why would she expect they’d somehow miss her visits to the Foundling Hall? She took a slow, deep breath—the type of breath she’d learned to take when she’d been injured and she was in pain.
The lights on the bracer began to dim, but they dimmed slowly.
Only when they were no longer visible did she turn to face Diarmat, the reports shaking in her tightened hands. Without a single word, she handed them back to him. He waited for a minute before nodding and retrieving them. “That will be all.”
She turned and made her way toward the doors, but stopped before she touched them and turned back. “They’re my hoard,” she told him quietly. She didn’t have to shout; Dragons, like Leontines, had a very acute sense of hearing.
His eyes were a pale shade of copper. “You are mortal,” he replied with no hesitation whatsoever. “Mortals neither have, nor understand, the concept. The word hoarding,” he added with genuine distaste, “is possibly as close as your inferior race can come.”
She turned instantly on her heel
