LITMIR.BIZ

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Tha’alani did. They hadn’t even questioned his presence. It would have been convenient if they had. He’d be on the other side of the gates, where he’d be marginally less annoying.

      The guards walked past the latticework of open—and utterly empty—fountains; past the blush of bright pink, deep red and shocking blue flower beds that bordered them; past the neat little circular domes that reminded Kaylin of nothing so much as hills. And if those homes were hills, they were approaching a small fortress that nestled among them. It was two stories tall, and the beams that supported the clay face were almost as wide as she was, and certainly taller. It was larger by far than the building in which Ybelline, the castelord—a word that didn’t suit her at all—chose to live. It was almost imposing.

      It was also bloody crowded.

      It boasted normal doors—rectangular doors, not the strange ones that adorned most of the Tha’alani homes; these doors weren’t meant to blend with the structure. They stood out. And they were pulled wide and pegged open. Which, given the number of people on the other side of them, made sense—closed doors would have made breathing anything but stale air and sweat almost impossible. As it was, it was dicey.

      “This is the longhouse,” Kaylin said.

      Demett nodded.

      “Demett,” she said, as he turned, “what is the longhouse used for?”

      His face went that shade of expressionless that actually meant he was talking—but only to the Tha’alaan: to the minds of his people, and the memories of the dead. She waited for it to pass, as if it were a cloud; it took a while.

      “Wait for Ybelline,” he told her quietly.

      Ybelline came through the crowd slowly. You could see where she might be moving because her movement caused the other Tha’alani to move, like a human wave composed entirely of bodies. The building was packed. Kaylin thought there might be six or seven hundred people just beyond the open doors, more if the children so absent from the streets were also there.

      But Ybelline did not come alone; the movement of the crowd, the slow outward push, wouldn’t have been necessary to allow just one person through. The people spilled out into the streets, beyond Kaylin and Severn. Rennick’s shoulders curled in, and he brought his hands up once or twice, as if to fend off any contact.

      The Tha’alani in turn avoided him.

      They would. They knew fear when they saw it, especially Rennick’s fear—and his fear was poison to them. They tried just as hard as he did to avoid any contact, but Kaylin had to admit they were more polite about it.

      Ybelline appeared at last, between the shoulders of about sixteen tightly grouped men and women. She wore robes, an earth-brown with green edges; her hair was arranged both artlessly and perfectly above her slender neck. Her eyes were the honey-brown of that hair, but they were ringed with gray circles. She looked exhausted.

      Exhaustion did not stop her from opening her arms, stepping forward and hugging Kaylin. And nothing in the world would have stopped Kaylin from returning that hug. Nothing.

      “Tell me,” she whispered, her lips beside Ybelline’s ear. She knew she should have introduced Rennick, but it had been Severn’s idea to drag him here, and he was therefore, for the moment, Severn’s problem.

      The slender stalks, which were the most obvious racial trait of all the Tha’alani, brushed strands of Kaylin’s hair from her forehead, and then settled gently against skin.

      They were so delicate, the touch so light, they could hardly be felt at all.

      But Ybelline could be—and more, she could be clearly heard. Could clearly hear. With this much contact, she could, if she wanted to, peruse every memory Kaylin had, including ones she wasn’t aware of herself. All the hidden things could be revealed, every bad or stupid or humiliating thing Kaylin had ever done.

      And Kaylin, knowing this, didn’t care.

      But she wasn’t prepared for Ybelline’s voice when it came. It was raw and, at first, there were no words—just the sense of things that might have become words with enough distance and effort. With too much distance and effort.

      But she saw what Ybelline meant her to see in the brief glimpse of steel and blood and the bodies of the fallen, all interposed, all flashing over and over again in quick succession in front of Kaylin’s eyes. Except that her eyes were closed.

      Help me. Just that, two words.

      Kaylin rolled up her sleeves and, without even looking at her wrist, pressed the gems on the bracer in the sequence that would open it: white, blue, white, blue, red, red, red. She dropped it on the ground as if it were garbage—but she could. If she’d tossed it on a garbage heap, it would find its way back to her. She’d only tried that once. Maybe twice.

      This was magic’s cage. And without it, she was free to do whatever she could. For this reason it was technically against orders to remove it.

      Her hands were tingling. “Ybelline,” she said, and then, Ybelline.

       Ybelline, you have to let go of me.

      The Tha’alani castelord did as Kaylin bid; she let go, withdrew her arms, her stalks. With them went the wild taste of fear—Ybelline’s fear. She kept it from the Tha’alaan, and therefore from her people, but she was exhausted. And Kaylin understood the exhaustion; it was hard for any Tha’alani to live alone, on the inside of their thoughts, the way humans did.

      The way humans needed to.

      The Tha’alani who had followed Ybelline out of the longhouse had come bearing stretchers. Four stretchers. Four men. They might once have worn armor—had, Kaylin thought, remembering the brief flash of images that had emerged from her contact with Ybelline.

      But they weren’t dead. They weren’t dead yet.

      “Put them down,” Kaylin said, easing her voice into the command that came naturally when she was on the beat. There were no children here; she had time to notice their absence, to be grateful for it. No more.

      The crowd stepped back. The bodies lay on stretchers. Someone had dressed wounds, had cleaned burns—burns!—had done what they could to preserve life. Freed of the constraints that the ancient bracer placed on her magic, Kaylin knelt between two of these stretchers and touched two foreheads with her right and left palms. She was gentle, although she didn’t have to be—the men here were in no danger of regaining consciousness anytime soon. They had that gray-white pallor that spoke of loss of blood. She was surprised that they hadn’t succumbed to the wounds they had taken. Many of those wounds weren’t clean cuts; they had been caused by people who weren’t used to handling weapons.

      Kaylin grimaced. “Severn?”

      She saw his shadow. Knew he was listening.

      “Get water,” she told him. “I’ll need it.”

      “There are four men—”

      “I can do this. Just—water. Food.”

      His shadow was still for a moment, but he was silent. Everything they said or did now—every single thing—would be watched by all of the Tha’alani, no matter where they were, no matter how young or how old, how strong or how weak. All of the Tha’alani who watched would see, and what they saw would become part of the Tha’alaan, the living memory of the entire race; Tha’alani children four hundred years from now could search the Tha’alaan and see the events of this day through the eyes of these witnesses.

      And for once in her life, Kaylin was determined to make a good impression.

      Severn knew; he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that humans—her kind, and his—had done this damage. He knew how important it was to the city that humans be seen to undo it. She didn’t even hear him go.

      It was hard.

      It was harder than destroying walls that were solid stone, harder than

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