stop right now.”
“Teela’s in a foul mood.”
Of course she was. Severn, Kaylin and Bellusdeo had gone to the fiefs as Hawks. Since Bellusdeo was a Dragon, Kaylin privately felt they had enough of a power escort that they didn’t need to also take Barrani Hawks. Teela clearly disagreed.
“Remember when you said you’d make an effort to trust me more with my own survival?”
“I trust you to be yourself.”
Mandoran grinned. “In Teela’s defense—”
“Teela,” Teela snapped, “will never be desperate enough to require your defense.”
“—you manage to wander into more trouble than anyone we’ve ever met. Except Terrano.” He laughed out loud. Terrano felt the same as Teela did. “Teela is now annoyed—”
“And Teela will speak for herself.”
“Fine. But you’re taking too long, and Terrano wants us all to shut up so Kaylin and Bellusdeo can get to the interesting bits.”
The cohort didn’t need to be present to be part of any conversation—as long as one of its members was. Teela didn’t count; she was so accustomed to keeping everything to herself, she had an excellent game face. She wouldn’t ask questions or offer answers at the cohort’s demand. Which was why Mandoran was here.
Kaylin glanced at Bellusdeo. “Do you want to continue, or do you want me to do it?”
“I’d prefer Severn, to be frank, but he managed to escape the debriefing by never passing through the front gate.”
“Fine. We were taking a shortcut across the borders.”
“You cannot possibly have considered that remotely sensible,” Teela snapped.
“It’s not the first time I’ve done it.”
“The first time, you had no choice. You made it through. But the second time? You were attacked by someone wielding purple elemental fire.”
“Probably Shadow fire, given what we now know.”
“Fine, quibble. You took Bellusdeo into the border zone.”
“Bellusdeo has been in far worse than your border zones.” It was the Dragon’s turn to snap.
Please don’t mention the Emperor. Please don’t mention the Emperor. Please. Since Kaylin wasn’t part of the cohort, Teela couldn’t hear her.
“Very well. Tell us what happened when you chose to save time.” Teela folded her arms. She’d not yet taken a seat, and by the looks of it, wasn’t about to start. Bending in half would have cracked something, given her mood.
“We found a building in the border zone, midway between the city and Ravellon. It had no doors, no windows, and seemed to be two stories in height. The one distinguishing feature it possessed, other than the pristine condition it was in, was a large, stone-appearing eye.”
“Appearing?”
“Well, it moved. I mean, the lid opened, and the eyeball it contained moved. When it saw us—or when we stepped into its field of vision—we were instantly transported into a large stone room. It was one story; the ceiling was very high.”
“To my eye,” Bellusdeo added, “the walls were stone and featureless. It appeared to be of the same pristine manufacture as the exterior walls.”
“In the border zone?” Teela asked. “That I know of, there has been no construction within that zone; the desperate might choose to take up residence within the dwellings, but the placement of those dwellings does not appear to be fixed or stable.” She lifted a hand before anyone else could speak and added, “Some basic research has been done by scholars who make the High Halls their home.”
Great. Another source of information that was likely to be more prickly and more difficult to navigate than the border zones themselves.
Helen’s eyes were still the wrong color.
“Kaylin, however, did not see the room in the same way I did; she had her familiar’s wing plastered to her face.”
Teela raised one dark brow in Kaylin’s direction; Kaylin picked up the story. “I saw carved reliefs across one wall—the wall facing us when we arrived.”
“Carved reliefs?”
Kaylin nodded. “Hope breathed on one of them, and when he did, Bellusdeo could see it. She believes—and Severn has gone to confirm—that that figure is a boy reported as missing.
“There were a lot of people, besides the possible missing person, engraved across the wall. It was like a sculptor’s rendition of a crowd; the boy was one of the figures at the forefront. There were a couple of Barrani, but they were farther back, and therefore less visible to me.”
“You didn’t recognize them.”
“No. We can assume,” Kaylin continued, “that they’re really old Barrani.”
“Bellusdeo didn’t see them.”
“No—I thought it was risky enough to have Hope breathe on one section of the wall, and he breathed on a figure in the foreground. The Barrani were well back. It’s because Bellusdeo could