Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara

Author:Michelle Sagara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LUNA
Published: 2005-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

She couldn’t step out of the circle. She didn’t even try; the wards on the floor had come, sizzling, to life, and she knew what they meant. The very first time she had entered this Tower, they had done the same. She’d been stupider then. She’d tried. Her forearms bore the diffuse scar of that single attempt.

But the circle was not a dome; she could stand.

And she couldn’t. Her arms and legs were shaking too much. She bowed her head. It was almost a gesture of respect; it was arguably a gesture of penitence.

“Not enough,” a familiar, cold voice said. She might have been thirteen again. She certainly felt it. “Kaylin Neya, you have publicly embarrassed the Hawks. You tried to kill an officer of the Lords of Law in full view of half the city.”

That was an exaggeration. She didn’t point it out.

“Worse, you started that attempt in the foundling halls. While the foundling halls and their funding has always been a source of resentment for you, they are not universally ignored by the high castes—killing people in front of orphaned children crosses several lines, all of them in the wrong direction. And you did both of these while wearing the uniform of the Hawks.”

“Not the beat uniform.”

Clearly, he wasn’t making the distinction. “I have been patient,” he told her, in a tone that clearly indicated his patience was at an end. “You will explain yourself, now. If the explanation is somehow satisfactory, you might be given the privilege of continuing to wear the mark of the Hawk. I will certainly be called upon to explain your actions to the Lords of Law, and Kaylin—it is not a comfortable position to be in. It will weaken the Hawks.”

She nodded. It was all she could do. Honesty—I didn’t even think of the Hawks—was so far from the best policy she tried to put as much distance between herself and it as she could. Found it wasn’t as hard as she wanted to believe it had become.

“I have been tolerant. Your first attempt to greet Severn was recorded, but it was not…acted upon. It was, I admit, a weakness, and I regret it now.

“You have been given leeway. You’ve been allowed the privacy of your past. What the Tha’alani took from you on the occasion of our first meeting was only what was relevant to that meeting. You’ve lost the right to that past now. It will be either public knowledge, or my knowledge, or you will never leave this Tower.”

He didn’t add “alive,” but he had never been one to state the obvious, unless pressed. Which she didn’t.

“You have served the Hawks well in your years here. I am therefore reluctant to call in the Tha’alani.”

She blanched.

“You have earned that much. But not more. What were you doing?”

She glanced at the mirror, and then away; she knew that he knew exactly what she had been doing. “I was trying to save them,” she said bitterly.

It was not the answer he had been expecting; she saw that by the slight rise of his wings.

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