Cast In Secret Read Online Free Page A

bridled slightly, but Severn merely nodded. “How difficult will that be, old man?”
    “Maybe you are a Hawk after all,” Evanton replied, eyeing Severn with barely veiled curiosity. “And the answer to that question is, I don’t know. I have no trouble.” He paused and added, “But that was not always the case. And I did not have myself as a guide, when I first came here.”
    “Who did you have?” Kaylin asked, tilting her head to one side.
    He raised a white brow.
    “Sorry, Evanton.”
    “Good girl. Oh, and Kaylin? I continue to allow you to visit here because of the great respect I have always felt for the Officers of the Halls of Law.”
    “But I haven’t – ” She stopped moving for a moment, and then brought her free hand up to her cheek to touch the skin across which lay a tattoo of a simple herb: Nightshade, by name. Deadly Nightshade, she thought to herself.
    If it had
only
been a tattoo, it would never cause her trouble. It felt like skin to her, and the Hawks had become so used to it, she could almost forget it existed.
    But this mark was – of course – magical, and it had been placed on her cheek by Lord Nightshade, a Barrani Lord who was outcaste to his people, and oh, wanted by every division in the Halls of Law for criminal activities beyond the river that divided the city itself.
    Lord Nightshade had marked her, and the mark meant something to the Barrani. It meant something to the Dragons. To the other mortal races, it was generally less offensive than most tattoos. But clearly, it meant something to Evanton, purveyor of junk and the odd useful magic. He understood that it linked her, in ways that not even Kaylin fully understood, to Lord Nightshade himself.
    But if Evanton’s eyes were narrowed, they were not suspicious. “Here,” he told her quietly, “there is some safety from the mark you bear. He will not find you, if he is looking.” He pushed the door open so slowly, Kaylin could have sworn she could feel the hours pass. “Is he?”
    “Is he what?”
    “Looking.”
    She shrugged, uneasy. “He knows where to find me,” she said at last.
    “Not, perhaps, a good thing, in your case. But enough. You are clearly yourself.”
    “You can tell that how?”
    “You could not have crossed my threshold if you were under his thrall.”
    She nodded. Believing him. Wanting to know
why
she couldn’t have.
    Severn spoke instead. “You sent a message to the Halls?”
    “Ah. No, actually, I didn’t. If you check your Records carefully, you will not find a single – ”
    Severn lifted his hand. “Where
did
you send the message?”
    “Ah. That would be telling. And probably telling too much,” the old man replied. “But people in power have an odd sense of what’s important. I imagine one of them took the time to read my elegant missive.”
    “You expected this visit.”
    “Of course. Forgive the lack of hospitality, but I don’t drink, and I can’t stand tea.”
    And he held the door slightly ajar, motioning them in. Watching them both more carefully than he had ever watched Kaylin before. She wasn’t certain how she knew this, because he looked the same – eyes and skin crinkled in lines around his lips, the narrow width of his face. He wasn’t smiling, but he almost never did.
    She meant to say something, but the words escaped her because from the width of the hall and the door she had expected the room to be tiny. And it was the size – and the height – of the Aerie in the Halls, where the winged Aerians who served the Hawklord could reach for, and almost touch, the sky.

    Sunlight streamed down from above, as if through colored glass; the air moved Kaylin’s hair across her cheeks, suggesting breeze and open space. As a fiefling, she had had no great love of open spaces, but daylight had always suggested safety. There was a hint of that safety here, and it surprised her – magic almost always made her skin crawl.
    The wooden plank flooring, often covered with