The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,138

has sent me as escort in her stead.” The old man’s smile was benign, his tone apologetic and friendly.

Severn didn’t believe a word the castelord had just spoken. For the first time since he had met Ybelline, he felt a growing dread of the Tha’alani. Dread, however, would not become terror. He bowed to the castelord.

“Come. We do not want to keep Ybelline waiting.” Adellos turned and began to walk down the street the gate bisected. Severn glanced once at the guards. They had not risen.

* * *

He had walked these streets before; the layout hadn’t changed. But the number of people, or more specifically, young children playing in them, had. They existed, but they did not leave their lawns or the area in front of their hill-like homes, and they neither approached nor gaped; nor did they lift hands to point.

He wondered what Adellos was saying or had said. And that was unfair. Adellos might not be the speaker. Scoros, however, had not had this effect on the children. Nor had either he or Ybelline had that effect on the gate guards. He felt as if he had wandered into a different Tha’alani quarter.

Because of one man.

Not two blocks passed before Severn stopped walking. His arms were at his sides; he looked as if he had paused to survey the landscape. He had.

Adellos paused half a block ahead, as if he expected Severn to simply follow. He too stopped and turned, but he had eyes for Severn; Severn’s were upon the Tha’alani, far fewer in number in the streets.

They had green eyes, or perhaps it was a trick of light and distance—but given the stillness, he didn’t think so.

“Does something trouble you?” Adellos asked, in the same benign tone.

“Yes.”

The Tha’alani castelord’s brow rose.

“There are no children in the street.”

Silence.

“There are almost no people in the street. What are you saying to them? What did you tell them?”

“I have said nothing,” he replied.

“Nothing?”

The castelord nodded.

“Nothing at all?”

A three-beat silence followed the question before it was broken. “I can see why Ybelline likes you. Yes. I have said nothing at all. They have not heard me—and I have not heard them—since I walked to the gates. I am not, now, in the confines of the Tha’alaan.”

They were not afraid of Severn.

They were afraid of, or for, the castelord, one of the few who could sunder himself from the racial mind of his people and survive it.

Every element of the case itself rearranged itself in Severn’s untouched thoughts. The oracle. The Oracular Halls. The visitors. The sketch and the figurine. Ybelline’s reactions to all of it.

For the first time, he regretted the absence of Elluvian. Elluvian would survive here. Severn Handred might not. One of the two witnesses gathered by the Barrani Hawks had been safely on the way to the Halls of Law in the crowded city streets—and they had died. The Barrani Hawks had been powerless to save them. The only surviving witness had been saved by An’Teela and Elianne, if the gossip was to be believed. Severn did believe.

He considered turning on his heel and leaving the quarter, but the gates were now closed.

“I like Ybelline,” he said instead as he stood his ground.

“She should never have gone to bespeak you on behalf of the Imperial Service.” Adellos walked to where Severn stood. He couldn’t force Severn to walk beside him.

“She had reasons for doing so. Reasons I’m certain you understand.”

Adellos’s nod was heavy.

“Did you serve the Imperial Service in your time?”

The castelord’s face had lost the avuncular, almost affectionate expression that had been pasted across it since the gates had opened. “Yes. In the time before I became castelord. It is one of the requirements.”

“And she is your daughter?”

“No. We are related only distantly by blood—as we are to most of our kin. We do not choose castelords by heredity.”

“How do you choose them?” Severn asked, partly because he was curious, and partly because he was stalling for time.

“How do you think we choose?”

It was a serious question, not a flippant one. Severn exhaled. He wondered if Ybelline would become Adellos with time and experience; it was a bitter thought. “Castelords would have to be Tha’alanari.”

Adellos nodded. “The legal structure of the caste courts was devised by the Emperor. The word castelord is not one that is native to our people.”

“They would have to be able to keep their thoughts—possibly the whole of their thoughts—from the Tha’alaan.”

He nodded again.

Exhaling, Severn said, “They’d have to be able to keep