“Oh?”
“I don’t know enough about the Barrani High Court.”
“The short version is: if he suspects that this tangle of a case has the approval of a Lord of the High Court, it’s bad.”
Severn nodded again. “Where would I find the information I lack? Without it, I won’t be able to assess the danger I’m facing.”
“Barrani bad,” she said. “For us, it doesn’t really matter what titles they use among themselves.”
“If they have titles, they’ve got access to a lot more underlings than we do.”
“Yes. Barrani underlings. They have money, which generally also means human underlings. And given the nature of the Hawklord’s request, they’ve got human underlings. Try not to get killed, hmmm?” She turned, once again, to the paperwork that was theoretically occupying her attention.
“I’ll do my best.” He cleared his throat. “The information?”
“The Imperial Service will have it,” she said without looking up. “But they’re incredibly difficult to deal with.”
“Are the Tha’alanari part of the Imperial Service?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks, Rosen.”
“You owe me.”
“I do.”
“Pay me back by surviving.” She turned to face him again. “I think we’ll lose Mellianne if we lose you. And it won’t be as clean a loss, either.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When Elluvian finally left Helmat’s office, he was not in agood mood. This was fair; while Helmat had stopped shouting, Elluvian suspected this was more due to exhaustion than depletion of anger.
“Severn is not Darrell,” Elluvian had said, in response to most of Helmat’s hurled invective.
He understood Helmat’s concerns. He’d recruited all of the Wolves as they were currently constituted, and believed he understood their weaknesses. And their strengths. The two were tightly entwined. He understood what Severn’s death would mean to morale.
Severn himself might not understand why; he was an outsider, on probation, not fully Wolf. The loss of an outsider, given his prior life, might strike him as irrelevant. Or perhaps not. There was something about Severn that implied a flexibility that Darrell—or Mellianne—had never possessed. If Mellianne survived, she would learn. Darrell would not.
Elluvian would have considered Helmat’s concerns trivial had it not been for An’Tellarus. Even at a remove of centuries, she still knew where to point the knife and how to drive it in. Not, of course, to kill him, because then her games would be over.
What surprised him was her interest in Severn. It was a surprise weighted by unease. He had avoided An’Tellarus for so long, were he human he might have forgotten her existence entirely. Or perhaps not. Barrani memory was reliable, and, as was the case with any living being, the events that caused scars became the memories closest to the surface—no matter how long ago those injuries had taken place.
Elluvian, still musing, headed toward Rosen’s desk. It pained him to see her stuck behind it; it pained her as well. But she had come to accept that this desk served a necessary function for the Wolves. He wondered if her injuries could be healed with sufficient magical power. It was not an entirely idle thought. He now knew the location of a healer.
She glared at him as he approached her desk.
He chose to ignore the glare. “The Hawks will take the two surviving witnesses into protective custody,” he told her.
She didn’t ask for any context whatsoever. Her nod was grim, her eyes narrow. She, like Helmat, was not best pleased with him.
“I wish to make certain that the Hawks sent to secure that protection are Barrani.”
Some of the tension left her face, her jaw. “Severn is worried.”
“He is not, despite his age, a fool.”
“He thinks that his investigation caused the deaths of two of the four witnesses.”