“Don’t you? Most mortals need food, and you live in Elantra, not the forests or the villages beyond its borders. Here, everything is owned and claimed; there, you might forage and feed yourself. You are, if I am not mistaken, a petty thief. But you are whole, healthy. Do you spend time in the warrens?”
“No.”
“May I ask why?”
“Can’t stop you.”
“No.” Elluvian exhaled. “What I ask of you would not, in any sense of the word, be illegal. I do not require petty thugs; did I, I would hunt in the warrens. Mortal petty thugs are all but irrelevant to me, to my kin.”
“What job?” The youth asked, after a significant pause.
Yes, Elluvian thought. There were trials and tests that the boy would have to overcome. “How much do you know about the Halls of Law?”
The silence was different. The young man could shutter his expression, control it, force the lines of his face to give nothing away. The lines of his body, however, he had not yet mastered; the drop and rise of shoulders, the tightening of arms, of hands, the shift of stance, the slight bend of knee.
“You want me to work in the Halls of Law.”
“You would need to submit to a more extensive interview, but yes.”
“What kind of interview?”
Clever boy. Elluvian smiled. “You won’t like it.”
His shrug implied that there was nothing on this earth he expected to enjoy.
“Tell me, what do you know of the Wolves?”
“Have I ever been mistaken?”
“Definemistake.” Helmat’s glare fell, rather more pointedly than necessary, upon his new desk ornament. That, Elluvian thought, would have to go. On the other hand, Helmat was still angry. The Wolflord folded his arms and now leaned into them, placing more of his weight and his imposing presence—for a mortal, of course—onto the desk, rather than away from it.
“He was a competent Wolf. The Emperor approved of his ability to carry out the executions demanded by Imperial writ. In the history of the Wolves, he is not the only operative who decided that he could, perhaps, be more effective than the current lord.”
“Murder is still illegal. Unless there’s a secret writ of execution given to my operatives, my death would disqualify him from ever holding that position. Was there?”
“Was there what?”
“A writ.”
“I wish you would not waste my time, Helmat.”
Helmat’s grin broadened. It remained both cold and sharp. “That’s not the way it would work, is it?”
Elluvian lifted his gaze to the ceiling, as if beseeching a nonexistent god for patience. “What did I say?”
“I can’t remember. However, it seems germane to point out that we do not always get what we want. I certainly did not want a very competent operative to destroy my door, kill one of his comrades and injure another, forcing her retirement from active duty. There are very few who serve the Wolves who die of happy old age.
“I do not expect to be one of them. But I would prefer—vastly prefer—that the figurative blade that ends my life be wielded by outsiders.”
“Or me, Helmat?”
“Or you. That’s generally how we retire, isn’t it?” The Wolflord’s grin was sharp; his eyes were bright. Too bright for a mortal.
“I would be Wolflord in your stead—in all of your steads—had the Emperor ever allowed it.” It wasn’t an answer. But Helmat had been one of the most successful of Elluvian’s students. “You understand why he does not.”
Helmat did. He didn’t, at the moment, care.
“I do not understand your continuing anger.”