Cast In Secret (19 page)

She paused to see if Kaylin understood, and Kaylin nodded, wondering just what kind of Hall she’d entered.

“Do not make loud noises. If you feel the need to shout or scream, hold it in, or you will be escorted off the premises and denied any chance at further entry.”

“Got it. Anything else?” She attempted to keep the sarcasm from totally overwhelming her voice.

She might as well not have bothered; the sarcasm that was already there was pretty thick and they seemed to have missed it entirely.

“Usually the list of rules is sent to the supplicant in advance of their visit,” Sigrenne said, frowning over Kaylin’s head at Sanabalis. “And we have not allowed supplicants to enter the Hall for a week.”

“Lord Sanabalis being a special case, I take it.”

“All direct servants of the Emperor being excepted, of course.” She gave Sanabalis a decidedly odd look, and then added, “But they’ve been good about who they send. Lord Sanabalis upsets many of the Oracles, but fascinates many more.”

Sanabalis nodded amiably in her direction. “We have no desire to upset the Oracles,” he said quietly. “It suits neither of our purposes.”

“Well, try to remember that,” Sigrenne said curtly. “Let’s get this over with. It’ll be lunch soon.”

The first thing Kaylin noticed about the occupants of the Hall – and it was possibly an odd thing to notice first, given her occupation – were the colors they wore. Their clothing was garishly mismatched, something that Kaylin generally avoided by wearing blacks or undyed cloth. If the matrons guarded their charges with recognizable ferocity, they certainly didn’t dress them.

Here and there were deep shades of purple, brilliant shades of red, a cacophony of blues and greens and turquoise, a hint of yellow-gold. Whole robes looked like quilts, and Kaylin had to do a double-take the first time just to make certain that the one that caught her eye had sleeves, and was not, in fact, pulled off a poor bed.

Some of the robes looked like a small child’s idea of magic – dark blue, with golden stars, golden swirls, and vivid, red eyes. Well, the eyes were maybe not so small child, but the rest was. Although the person wearing the robes was definitely long past the age at which
child
could be remotely applied to him, there was something about the way he looked around, picked up objects – like, say, the lamp, which made one of the two Matrons cringe slightly, although she said nothing – and looked at them with curiosity and open wonder that made him seem young.

“Christen is new here,” Sigrenne said, by way of comment. “He was not treated entirely well in his former home, and he is perhaps a bit unusual by even our standards. He speaks,” she added, “and has not yet adapted to our rules.”

Kaylin nodded. Her eyes wandered around the room, taking in the clothing – one man was wearing a very real crown, and sported a beard in a style that was better suited for stiff portraiture than life – and the silence of the occupants. She had thought that Oracles were like the so-called nomadics who wandered in during the summers and sold fortunes by the pound. Of gold. She thought that they were possibly pretentious liars. That they indulged in mystery and the mysterious – seeing so very few people – for reasons of commerce, of manipulation.

She had even met one or two in the Halls of Law – but they were
nothing
like this.

What Sanabalis had told her to do before they’d left the carriage, she did now: she threw out all of those conceptions. She understood in that one sweeping, slow glance why so few were allowed here. It would be very, very hard to take anything these people said seriously. If they spoke at all. It would be hard not to treat them as deranged, drunken idiots. Or just idiots.

And… she understood the reaction of the Matrons to new people, because on occasion, as if furtively, these steel-haired women did throw an alarmed or affectionate glance at the strangely attired men, women and children who roamed freely in the wide spaces, or who plastered themselves against the walls of the long hall, or who draped themselves limply over the stair rails, kicking their feet slowly and steadily behind them. These ferocious women clearly had no desire to see their charges exposed to ridicule or condescension.

This was supposed to be a house for very odd people, who might have a glimpse into the future. Kaylin wasn’t certain she believed this, but given how odd the people were, she was certain
they
did. And intent mattered, both for the law and for Kaylin.

Sanabalis did not speak, and their passage through the hall drew no attention until they were almost at the far door. But when they were about ten feet from its safety, a small child darted out – in a green-yellow dress with large purple patches – and latched onto Kaylin’s leg.

Her hair was sort of braided, although strands of fine gold had worked free; her eyes were a wide gray-blue that should have looked cold in the pale white of her face. Her lips were small, and they were moving; Kaylin thought she might be all of six years old, although she could be younger or older by a year or two.

The order not to speak flew out the window, and out of Kaylin’s mind, as the child turned her face up to Kaylin’s and pulled on her knee – a universal request for the larger person to get down to the child’s level. Kaylin knelt at once. The child reached out and touched the mark on her face – the nightshade, pale blue against decidedly less pale skin.

And then she said, “You’re a book.”

Kaylin nodded, as if this made sense.

“There is writing all over you,” the girl added in a soft, matter-of-fact tone. And it was true, although none of that writing was actually exposed. It lay beneath shirt and pants and collar and hair, hidden. But not to the child.

The child could see.

So…

“What does it say?” Kaylin asked quietly, breaking one of the rules she had been told to follow at risk of permanent ejection.

“Well,” the girl replied, “I’m not sure. I don’t want you to leave yet, though. I want to read the whole story.”

“I don’t think it’s finished yet.”

“Oh?”

“It’s just a guess.”

Serious-eyed, serious-voiced, the child said, “But it’s yours, so you should know. The words are fighting, though,” she added. “Maybe when they finish, there’ll be an ending.”

Before she could stop her mouth – a habit that had never taken hold except in formal interrogations – Kaylin said to the girl, “Will I survive it, do you think?” And the steel-eyed doll of a child looked at her for a long time as she considered not her face, but her arms, her legs, as if looking at clothing. But then she moved around Kaylin’s back, and Kaylin sat utterly still, as if such inspection were natural. Kaylin knew what she was looking at. The writing that had appeared last.

The silence went on for a moment, and then the child said, in a voice that was high and fluting, a girl’s precocious voice, “We all die.”

“Marai,” Sigrenne said quietly, “you will alarm our guest.” She had bent slightly in her gleaming metal, and the child looked not the least intimidated.

“Oh, she’s seen
lots and lots
of death,” Marai replied confidently. “And I don’t scare her at all. I can make a scary face,” she added, with less confidence. “But that only works on Mika.”

“Have you eaten lunch?”

“Lunch?” Marai replied, as if Sigrenne had just asked her if she knew what the moons were made of. “Is it lunchtime?”

“It is past lunchtime.”

“Well then, I must have eaten.”

“And what did you eat?”

“Noodles and cheese and the funny salty rolled meat.”

“No dear, that’s in two days.”

“Or last week.”

Sigrenne smiled. “Go and find something to eat, Marai. Remember what Master Seltzen said. You must remember to live in the now sometime.”

Marai nodded somberly, and with a regretful glance at Kaylin, she backed away.

Kaylin rose and was met by the stony glare of slightly orange Dragon eyes. The eyes were lidded. “Sigrenne,” he began, but Sigrenne had turned to Kaylin with a thin-lipped frown already forming across her weathered face.

“I believe I made the rules clear,” she said coolly.

Kaylin nodded, sparing the child a backward glance, as fascinated by her as the child had been by the writing that she
could not
have seen by any normal means. “But she’s a child,” she said, with a bit of a guilty inflection. “And she was speaking to me.”

“Yes. And because
she
is a child, she will not be in too much trouble for
also
breaking the rules.”

“They have rules?”

“Yes. They are not to speak to strangers.”

“Oh. The usual rules.”

“The usual rules, yes. And,” Sigrenne added, relenting, “they follow rules as well as most children that age do.”

“I’m sorry – I’m not used to ignoring children.”

“Oh?”

“Private Neya,” Sanabalis said, stepping in and speaking in a smooth, almost officious tone, “does much of her volunteer work with two worthy organizations. The guild of midwives, and the Foundling Hall. She has spent many of her adult years around children who feel isolated, and I ask, as a favor, that you overlook her gross infraction.”

“The Foundling Hall?” Sigrenne said, raising a brow and looking at Kaylin for the first time as if she were another woman, and not a possible criminal. “You know Marrin, then?”

Kaylin’s brows rose higher. “You know Marrin?”

“Aye, I’ve spoken with her a time or ten,” Sigrenne said with a wry smile.

“I know her, yes. Her fangs are still sharp and her claws still draw blood.”

Sigrenne frowned, and Kaylin reddened slightly. “It’s a translation of a Leontine saying, but it basically means she’s not in her dotage yet.”

“That old lion will never be in her dotage. She can be an infuriatingly territorial – ”

“She
is
Leontine.”

“Aye, she is that.”

“And the children she takes in are in some ways her pridelea, the kin she has chosen. I don’t know why she doesn’t have a pridelea of her own, and I’ve never asked.”

“I have,” Sigrenne said, wincing. “Don’t.”

“But – but how do you know her?”

Sigrenne’s face grew serious again. “You met Marai?”

Kaylin nodded.

“And you didn’t recognize her?”

“No.”

“Ah. She wasn’t at the Foundling Hall for more than a day or two. Marrin has a sixth sense, I swear. I mean, an almost Oracular sense. The child was dumped on the grounds, and brought to Marrin by the groundskeeper – what is his name again?”

“Albert.”

“Ah, yes. Albert. She’d been left there. Many, many of the Oracles are abandoned by their parents. Some are killed,” she added, and here a flash of fury colored her cheeks for a moment.

“But – but why?”

“The less affected the Oracles are by their gift – and in early childhood, they are not quite as lost as they can later become – the more often they ask inappropriate questions about things like their parents’ infidelities. In public places. They know things they shouldn’t know and see things they shouldn’t see, and very often they are viewed as witch children and a great evil.

“They are feared,” Sigrenne added, “without understanding.”

“Some of those that survive are found by Marrin, and she will call us. She’s not terribly good about releasing the children, and believe that she’s paid us a visit or ten just to make sure that her children aren’t suffering.”

Kaylin laughed at that, and the unnamed woman also chuckled. It made her seem younger than her armor or her bearing. “So some of Marrin’s kittens are here.”

“Not so many, but yes, some of them are here. Some are much older than Marai, but Marrin found them and kept them safe. One boy was badly burned,” Sigrenne added, “when Marrin found him. Apparently his uncle came back to try to finish the job. There wasn’t a lot left of the uncle, from what I heard.”

“From who?”

“I have friends in the Halls of Law,” she replied coolly.

“So do I,” Kaylin said with the hint of a grin. “And at the moment, suicide isn’t illegal.”

“It wasn’t exactly suicide – ” And then Sigrenne also laughed. “I see you
do
know Marrin.”

“She has my mirror,” Kaylin replied. “And she’s not afraid to use it.”

“Very well, if you’ve worked for the old beast, we’ll overlook this. Marrin is quite protective and ignoring one of her kits in that particular way would probably cost you a hand.”

“Well, finger.”

“Infection happens.”

Kaylin found herself liking this older woman. “And these,” she said softly, “are your kitlings.”

“Yes.”

The Hawk found herself completely relaxing. Because this was now a place she understood. “I won’t harm them,” she said. “Or I’ll do my best not to alarm them.”

“Aye, you will. But
try
a bit harder, girl. They sometimes want company, and some of them don’t know how to ask for it very well.”

Kaylin nodded.

“And if they scream and run at the sight of you, don’t take it personally, and try not to jump or scream in response.”

“Got it. Personally, several of my coworkers already have that reaction to me, and I’ve found it’s best not to encourage them.”

They managed to get out of the long, open space without further incident, and Sanabalis’s eyes had already returned to the calm gold of Dragon ease. He even gave Kaylin a slight nod of approval at her handling of the affair, which she accepted even though she knew it was undeserved.

They were led to rooms that seemed both sumptuous and plain; they were obviously designed in a way to impress visitors of rank and leisure, but they were not so ornate or gaudy that they made Kaylin uncomfortable.

“Wait here,” Sigrenne told them both. “And make yourself comfortable. It is not always easy to disturb the Oracles, but the Master of the Hall is expecting you, and he is much less wayward.”

“He deals with visitors?”

“We call them supplicants – or he does. And yes, every single person who wishes to pose a question to the Oracles must first speak to the Master. He usually throws out about a hundred requests a month as trivial and foolish wastes of both time and money.”