Cast In Shadow. Michelle Sagara

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      “Then don’t lose, Kaylin. Here they come.” His smile was a thin stretch of lip over teeth. It made her feel every one of the five years that had always separated them.

      “Fine.”

      Tiamaris rolled his eyes. “You are children,” he said, just shy of open contempt. The words were Barrani—she wondered if the Dragon condescended to speak any other language when dealing with mere mortals—but the tone wasn’t. Quite. He folded arms across his broad chest and leaned back against the faded wood and brick of an old building.

      The men closed in. They were armed; they carried naked blades. One sword, she thought, a short one, and three knives that were as long as Severn’s weapon.

      “Hey, hey,” one said. He was a tall man, and his face was knife-thin, his eyes dark. “You’re visitors, I see. You’ve probably forgotten to pay the toll.”

      Severn said nothing.

      “You pay us, we’ll let you pass.”

      Kaylin added more nothing.

      The man smiled. “You don’t pay, and we’ll double the tolls, and extract them from your purses. Oh, wait, you don’t seem to have them.” He shrugged. Without turning, he said something in mangled Barrani. Kaylin understood it and tensed.

      But her hand didn’t fall to her daggers, her throwing knives or her small club. Instead, she widened her stance and waited, watching them carefully. They wore some armor; it was piecework, and it wasn’t very good. But they weren’t slugs; they moved.

      Two to one odds gave them some confidence; it was clear that Tiamaris had no intention of interfering, and he became just another part of the landscape. In the fiefs, this was not uncommon. In fact, given it was the fiefs, there were probably people up windowside, in the relative safety of their tiny homes, crouching and making bets with their roommates. Betting was the pastime of choice in the fiefs, especially when it involved someone else’s messy death.

      “How well did they train you, in the Wolves?” Kaylin asked.

      “Watch and see.”

      “Like hell.”

      He laughed.

      She might have added something, but there was no more time for words.

      She should have let Severn take the leader, because they were both the same height, and the advantage of height was not her friend. There was an advantage in lack of height, but it usually involved doing one’s best to look harmless and pathetic, and she’d given up that route when she’d left the fiefs to find the Hawklord.

      Being a woman? Meant nothing, to the fieflord’s thugs. Hell, she’d seen women in their ranks who were far more vicious than the men when they wanted to be.

      The city ladies made femininity a triumph of style, and honed their tongues instead of their daggers. Kaylin knew that seven years in the city had failed to make a mark when she swung in before Severn could.

      The leader wasn’t stupid, but he was overconfident; she wasn’t armed, and she wasn’t dressed like a flashy guard. He swung the dagger wide, choosing its edge as a threat, and not its point.

      Damage, not death; not yet.

      His loss. She let him swing, raising the bracer that caged her; the knife’s edge sheared through linen threads, and bounced up at an angle, leaving his ribs exposed. She was inches from his side before he could bring the long knife down, and she raised her leg to deflect his awkward kick.

      She swung in, one-two, breath coming out like short, sharp punctuation as she applied the whole of her considerable training to a single point. She felt bone snap; heard him grunt. He was good; she gave him that. He did no more than grunt.

      But he didn’t have much opportunity; her fist rose, opening at the last minute into flat palm as it clipped the underside of his chin, snapping his head up. She hit him in the Adam’s apple, and he stumbled backward.

      Severn’s snap-kick sent him into the two men who were coming up behind him. He didn’t hit them dead on; they’d already started to separate. But he did hit their right and left arms, putting them off balance.

      Rules in the fiefs were pretty simple. Honorable fights were for stories, idiots or dead people.

      Kaylin was already on the move, going for the man with the long knife on the left; Severn had the man with the short sword in his sights. She had the impression of height, width, dark hair; she could see a flash of red as the man with the sword swore, again in mangled Barrani. No doubt at all who these men served.

      The man she now faced, off balance, was heavier than his leader. He wasn’t any better armored, and he was cautious—but overbalanced and cautious were a poor combination. She let gravity take its toll on her opponent. He was fighting it, but that meant he was fighting on two fronts. She launched into a roundhouse kick, grounded her foot, spun on it, and finished with a back kick. Nothing broke this time, but the man staggered, dropping his weapon as he clutched his stomach.

      The fourth man came in on her right.

      He’d had enough time to survey the fight, and just enough time to pick his target; she obviously appeared to be the weaker of the two. It annoyed her. Marcus would have had her hide—although he considered humans to have so little hide it was almost not worth taking—had she let the annoyance get the better of her.

      She did the next best thing; she kicked his knee. Hard. She caught him on the side of the leg, and he grunted; he swung his long knife in, and she twisted her arm up in an instinctive, almost impossible position, to deflect it. Thankful for cages, for just a minute. There wasn’t a weapon in the city that could go through that bracer. The blow drove her arm into her chest, and she threw her weight onto her back leg, snapping a kick with her front one.

      He grabbed for her leg. He was too slow; it brought his chest in close enough that she could hit him. She did, throwing her fists forward and butting the underside of his chin with her head.

      She heard his jaw snap shut.

      And then he went flying as Severn caught the side of his head with an extended side swing. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

      And he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Then again, neither was she. She straightened up. “Two and a half,” she said calmly.

      “Two.”

      “Yours was an assist. I had him.”

      Tiamaris, however, had had something different: enough. “If you insist,” he said in cold and perfect Barrani, something to be feared in the fiefs, “you can play these games until sunset. But if you’ve finished proving some vague human dominance theory, we have work to do.”

      Killjoy. She caught his expression, however, and slammed her teeth down over the word.

      “Training in the Hawks isn’t bad,” Severn said, as he fell in step beside her, shortening his stride.

      “Wolves obviously know what they’re doing,” she replied, grudging the words. “We’re even here.”

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