LITMIR.BIZ

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you going to do about it?”

      He spread his hands across the knobs at the end of his armrests. “What am I going to do? At the moment, very little.”

      She snorted. “Fine. What am I going to do?”

      “A more salient question. You are going to accompany Lord Tiamaris to the fiefs to investigate the difficulty. Think of how you’re going to approach this,” he added, as he rose. “If you require entry into Barren—”

      Kaylin lifted a hand. “I know how I’ll get in,” she told him curtly. Then, trying to smooth the edge out of her voice, she added, “I have no idea how to do it with Tiamaris tagging along.”

      “Tiamaris,” Sanabalis replied, “is not optional.”

      Sanabalis left her abruptly, but his departure wasn’t the usual mystery; a Dragon roared, the palace shook, and when the tremors had died down, he was already out the door. She thought the voice sounded familiar, but it was hard to tell; the roar had momentarily deafened Kaylin.

      She ate in silence, although she did so from the ledge of the window, watching the flags atop the Halls of Law. If she had sneered at those Halls as a child—and she must have, being a fiefling, although she honestly didn’t remember it—she felt no similar disdain now; the Halls served a purpose. One only had to cross the Ablayne to see the effects of the districts beyond their reach. Yes, the law wasn’t perfect; yes, its officers and representatives made mistakes.

      But the alternative was so much worse. She’d lived it; she knew.

      She had avoided the fiefs for over seven years now, approaching them solely at the request of her superiors in one Hall or another. It wasn’t simply cowardice or distaste; it wasn’t a desire to separate herself from her roots or her past. She was afraid of what the fiefs contained.

      But if she let that fear govern her, unspoken and unacknowledged as it so often was, the fiefs would come to her. They would eat away at Barren, and if Barren himself deserved it, the people who eked out a miserable living in his fief probably didn’t; they did—as Kaylin had done in Nightshade—what they needed to, to survive.

      She couldn’t judge them; didn’t even want to. That wasn’t her job.

      The door opened, and she turned slowly to see Tiamaris—and the Arkon. Sanabalis, slightly shorter, stood behind them.

      The Arkon lifted a slender, wrinkled hand. “Private Neya,” he said.

      She slid off the ledge, and offered him a full bow. If it wasn’t a good bow, he didn’t appear to notice. Neither did Sanabalis, but she could see that in his case, it took effort.

      “I am prepared,” the Arkon told her, as he entered the room, surveyed the chairs, and took the one Sanabalis habitually occupied, “to discuss Ravellon.”

      CHAPTER 7

      Kaylin had once been warned not to ask the Arkon about Ravellon if she valued her life, or at least having all her limbs attached. She reminded herself that she hadn’t asked as she took the nearest chair that would support her weight. Given the room was a hospitality suite for a Dragon Lord, that would be any of them.

      “Lord Tiamaris, if you will be seated?” the Arkon said, in a tone of voice that made Marcus’s commands seem polite and obsequious.

      Tiamaris, in this, was Kaylin’s superior; he apologized instantly for his inattentiveness, and he took his seat in perfect silence.

      “Private Neya, it has come to my attention that you spent some time in Barren recently.”

      She opened her mouth. Tiamaris stepped lightly—for a Dragon—on her foot. “By recently, of course,” Tiamaris told her, “the Arkon refers to anything that happened during the course of my lifetime.”

      “Oh.”

      The Arkon raised a white brow. “Understand that our knowledge of the fiefs is…incomplete. What understanding we have is not entirely reliable. The fiefs are not hospitable to those who are not their masters.”

      She nodded.

      “Was our information accurate?”

      “Yes. I was in Barren seven years ago.” She spoke quietly, and without her usual confidence. “I don’t know much about the fief that anyone who lives there every day wouldn’t know.” This was not entirely the truth, but it was enough of the truth, if you narrowed the definition of everyone slightly.

      The Arkon didn’t appear unduly suspicious. “Did you ever have cause to meet with the fieflord there?”

      Her silence was more pronounced. But Dragons lived forever, absent things that were actively hostile; time meant less to them. “Yes. Yes, I met Barren.”

      “Good. What can you tell me about this fieflord?”

      “What do you want to know?”

      “Is he human?”

      She nodded. “As human as I—as—”

      His lips curved in a smile. “As human as most of the citizens of Elantra?”

      “As that, yes. He was older than I was. He’s probably forty now, maybe a little older. Possibly a little younger. The fiefs tend to age people.”

      “Where did he come from?”

      “Come from?”

      The Arkon glanced at Sanabalis. “I believe I asked the correct question?”

      “Yes, Arkon.”

      “I—I don’t know. He was the fieflord. I didn’t exactly ask.”

      The Arkon frowned. “And he did not choose to enlighten you?” Even the Arkon could read the silence that followed his question. “Very well. The fief of Barren—as do all fiefs—border the heart of the fiefs themselves. We cannot pierce the shadows there,” he added. “By any means save entering them. The Aerians can fly over the edges, but in the center, flight falters.”

      “How do you know?”

      “How do you think we know?”

      She swallowed and thought of Clint. But she didn’t ask more, mostly because she was afraid the answer would enrage her; she’d always loved the Aerian Hawks. “Why do you think they can’t fly over the heart of the fiefs?” It was a safer question, as comment seemed expected.

      His brows rippled slightly, but he didn’t seem annoyed. “One of two possibilities exist. The first: that the heart is magically protected in some fashion, and in a way that defies the expedience of simple geography. It is not the explanation I favor,” he added. “The second is slightly more complex. How far did you proceed in your studies on magical theory?”

      When she failed to produce an answer, the brows rose again, but this time, the expression he offered was less benign. “You have studied magical theory? Sanabalis?” Clearly, the shock of her second nonanswer caused him to forget the nicety of something as simple as a title.

      “Her studies in magical theory were not considered mandatory for a member of the groundhawks.”

      “It is hardly possible to have a conversation with someone who has no grounding in the basics. I might as well speak in my native tongue for all the good it will do.”

      “Indeed,” Sanabalis replied.

      “Alleviate the difficulty. You are teaching her, are you not?”

      “Yes, Arkon.”

      Kaylin wilted visibly. She’d long since realized that there were whole days that did not reward getting out of bed; she thought it a bit unfair that whole weeks could also be like that. “Pretend I’m ignorant,” she began.

      “It hardly requires pretense,” the Arkon replied stiffly.

      Reminding herself that she

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