The Last Mortal Bond (27 page)

He'd nodded unsteadily, pushing himself free of Talal. Blood sheeted his face, obscuring his features. “Looks worse than it is…”

“Can you swim?” Gwenna asked.

Jak glanced at the black, lapping waves. “Normally, yes, but…” He raised his fingers gingerly to the nasty gash across his scalp, swayed, then shuddered. “I … maybe…”

“Maybe's not good enough,” Gwenna replied. She pointed at the cliff above. Even in the dark, their pursuers were getting close. “If you can't swim, you're on your own.”

“He's a liability if we leave him alive,” Annick said.

Qora spun about to confront the sniper. “What are you suggesting?”

“That we bring him,” Annick said, not bothering to look over. “Or we kill him. I'm fine either way.”

The man named Jak stared at Annick, then turned to Gwenna. “Who in Hull's name
are
you?” he whispered.

“No one,” Gwenna said. There was something about the man, about his voice or his bloody face, that nagged at her memory, but she couldn't place it. “Just sightseeing. Heard Hook was nice this time of year. Now get in the fucking water. Head north.”

“Look at him,” Qora demanded, leaning forward. “He can barely stand. We need a different plan.”

“By all means,” Gwenna said, gesturing to the ocean behind them, the tiered limestone looming above. “I always enjoy hearing plans.” She paused, put a cupped hand to her ear. “If you wait just a minute, our friends on the ridgeline will be here. You can tell them about it, too.”

Qora's jaw tightened. “Leave us, then, if you're scared. We'll take care of ourselves.”

“Because
that's
been working out so well.”

“Gwenna,” Talal said, gesturing to the east. “Normally I'd take the time to talk, but…”

She nodded, turning back to Qora. “Look. I understand that you like this guy. Maybe he's your pasty brother. Maybe the two of you have been grinding hips when you should have been training. Doesn't matter. I'm not sure if you were paying attention back there, but he
abandoned
you. I was watching when those bastards in black tightened their net, and do you want to know what he did?”

Waves ground a thousand thousand small stones down the surface of the narrow beach. The west wind had picked up, flicking spray off the sea. The shouts on the cliff were closer, at least ten voices, male, angry, and confused. Annick half drew her bow and stepped out from the shadows, eyeing the rough trail they had just descended.

“Give the word,” the sniper said. “I'll have a shot as soon as they come over the ridge.”

Gwenna shook her head. “They're just guessing we're down here. No reason to confirm it.” She turned her attention to Jak once more, trying again to remember where she'd seen him, how she remembered him.

“How about it, asshole?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You want to tell your lady friend how you left her to twist in the wind?”

She had expected defiance or fury, expected him to snarl or come at her. Instead, his face crumpled. It took a moment for her to realize, shocked, that the star-bright lines carved through the drying blood smeared across his face … those were tears.

“I couldn't…,” he began. “I just … I
couldn't.
…”

Some old instinct shifted inside her;
pity,
she realized after a moment. Whoever the poor fucker was, he wasn't Kettral. Not everyone had trained half a lifetime to face down a dozen killers in a crowd. Clearly, Jak hadn't volunteered to battle men with smoke steel blades and murderous birds, and he was hardly the first person to freeze like a fawn when the blood started flying.

None of that mattered. What mattered was getting away, getting clear. Gwenna had always been a shitty card player, but it was time to bluff, so she took a deep breath and bluffed: “You can swim, or I can kill you quick. Your call.”

Jak's head jerked up. She saw the fear blaze through his eyes, hot and bright as lightning. She might have felt bad, but there was no time for feeling bad.

She slid her knife from the sheath. “I'll count to one.”

The man held up his hands. “I'll swim.”

*   *   *

Gwenna ended up having to drag him the last few hundred paces, stroking with one arm and scissor-kicking hard while she kept the other hand clamped over his chest. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked. They reached a thick stand of mangroves just before dawn, slipping into the twisting waterways between the roots. Anyone trying to track them would need to do so over a mile of open ocean, and the mangroves themselves would pose even more difficulty for their pursuers.

As a cadet, Gwenna had always hated the mangrove stands—the trees were too thick to allow swimming, the water too deep for easy wading, the branches just the right level to take out an eye. You could spend half a morning covering half a mile, especially if you were trying not to make noise. Bad territory for training exercises, but a great spot to regroup. There'd been no sign of pursuit since the beach, but that wasn't a reason to get stupid. Whatever the next step, she planned to wait out the daylight among the knobby, twisted trees. Which gave them all plenty of time to get acquainted.

Gwenna eased back against one of the trunks, balanced a naked blade on her knees, then pointed a finger at Qora.

“So. Where should we start?”

“We can start,” Qora spat, “with the fact that you blew our best chance at killing those bastards.”

For a moment Gwenna could only stare.

“You have got to be kidding,” she said finally.

“I'm
not
kidding. We had it set up, Jak and I. We'd figured the whole scene, and then you assholes showed up, whoever the fuck you are.…”

Qora trailed off, breathing hard. Gwenna looked over at Talal, wondering if she was losing her mind. The leach just shrugged. He was sitting on a twisted root a pace away, a hand on Jak's shoulder, steadying the man as he vomited up the last salt water from the swim. It was disgusting, but at least it kept him from talking. The more Qora talked, the more Gwenna wanted to spend a little time drowning
her
.

“You were about to get killed…,” Gwenna said, trying to keep her voice level, reasonable.

“No!” Qora said, eyes huge and furious. “I had an exit. You didn't see how we set it up.”

“And did you see the men moving toward you through the crowd?”

The woman nodded. “I saw
both
of them.”

Gwenna raised her brows. “Both? There were
five
.”

“Henk and his gang were still on the dock.”

Gwenna shook her head. “You were looking at the wrong thing.”

“I was looking at the sons of bitches who have been hunting us like dogs for the better part of a year.”

“Like I said,” Gwenna replied. “The wrong thing.”

Jak groaned, then raised his head. “What do you mean?” he asked quietly. The long swim had washed the blood from his face, and Gwenna studied him for a few heartbeats, tumbling his name over and over in her head.
Jak.
Who in Hull's name was Jak? The answer eluded her, as it had all night. She turned back to Qora.

“Look at this,” she said, holding a hand above her head, fluttering the fingers slightly. Qora looked up. Gwenna drove a fist into her gut, caught the back of her neck, and shoved her head underwater. The woman struggled and splashed, clawed indiscriminately at Gwenna's leg, at the sprawling mangrove roots, battered pointlessly at the water. Annick shifted to avoid the thrashing. Qora was stronger than she looked, but strong didn't matter much when you couldn't breathe. Jak, eyes huge as plates, started to move, but Talal brought him up short with a knife at the neck.

“Don't worry,” Gwenna said, satisfied to hear that she'd kept the anger out of her voice. “It's all right.”

She counted to fifteen, then dragged the woman up, shoving her into one of the mangrove trunks just in time to avoid getting puked on. Qora choked and coughed and swore, looked like she was going to lunge for Gwenna, then subsided, jaw clenched with suppressed fury, brown eyes ablaze.

“If you keep looking at the wrong things,” Gwenna explained patiently, “you're not going to make it.”

The woman coughed once more, hacking up half a lungful of water. “Fuck you.”

“Not my type,” Gwenna replied. Her patience was fraying. She thought back to the Flea, tried to channel something of his unflappable calm. “We're trying to help you.”

“By drowning me?” Qora spat. “By putting a knife to my friend's throat?”

Gwenna looked over at Talal. “He's all right.”

The leach met her eyes, then slipped the blade back into its sheath.

“There,” Gwenna said. “Can we talk like adults now?”

Qora shook her head. “Who
are
you?” she asked again.

“We are confused,” Gwenna said. “Confusion makes us nervous, and when I'm nervous I start holding heads underwater. So maybe you could take the first turn answering questions.”

On the whole, it felt like a very temperate proposition. Qora, however, didn't look at all pacified. She looked ready to keep fighting, if you could call having your head stuffed under the water and held there fighting. Gwenna blew out a breath and got ready for the next round, but Talal leaned forward instead, putting a conciliatory hand between them.

“We came to help,” he murmured.

“That's what
I
said!” Gwenna protested. “I already said that.”

Talal nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on Qora. “We came to help,” he said again.

“To help who?” Qora demanded.

“Whoever's fighting the men with the birds. Soldiers flying kettral have already killed some of our friends. They tried to kill us. If you're against them, we're with you.”

Gwenna leaned back against the narrow trunk of the mangrove. Probably she should have let Talal do the talking from the start. He had a way of bringing people around without holding their heads underwater. She forced herself to relax, to close her eyes, to feel the late-morning sun filtering down through the leaves, bright and hot. She might not be great with the talking, but at least she understood when to shut up and get out of the way.

“Those men with the bird,” Talal said. “They set the fire because the townspeople were helping you? Hiding you?”

Qora nodded warily. “It was punishment. A lesson. They love their 'Kent-kissing lessons.”

“And who
are
they?”

“Kettral.” She spat the word.

Talal frowned. “I didn't recognize them, and I trained on these islands for almost a decade.” He glanced over at Gwenna, then Annick.

“Nope,” Gwenna replied.

The sniper just shook her head.

“They're calling themselves Kettral, anyway,” Qora went on. “No better than us, really. Just Jakob Rallen's thugs.”

“Rallen?” Gwenna asked, confusion getting the better of her.

Qora nodded grimly. “He's in charge now.”

It made less than no sense. Jakob Rallen had been Master of Cadets for better than ten years, but no one had taken him much more seriously than the chair he sat in.

“In charge of
what
?” Gwenna asked.

“The Eyrie. He still calls it that, but really it's just his own personal racket now—raising yellowbloom over on Qarsh, using the birds to get it to market overseas, selling it for a massive profit, using the money to buy whatever he needs to cement his position here. He calls it the Eyrie, but it's just a yellowbloom operation.”

Jak nodded. “Rallen styles himself a commander of the Eyrie, but he's just the one in charge of running the drug.”

Gwenna spat into the water. “That useless bastard couldn't run a bonfire if the wood was already piled and someone else lit the match.”

“Yeah, well, he's burned plenty,” Qora replied. “As you saw last night. And not just buildings. He's tied people to poles, doused them with oil, and lit them ablaze. He's a vicious son of a bitch, and he's in charge.”

“And you're the resistance,” Talal concluded.

Qora hesitated, then nodded warily.

Gwenna glanced over at Jak. His broad shoulders were slumped, but he was watching her and seemed a good sight more cooperative than Qora.

“Where are the rest of you?” Gwenna asked.

He opened his mouth, but Qora cut him off before he could respond.

“Not a chance,” she said, shaking her head.

“They saved us, Qora,” Jak observed quietly. The man was obviously strong—he had the chest and shoulders of a serious swimmer, which was saying something on an archipelago where
everyone
could swim a mile or two before breakfast—but his voice was soft, deferential. If Gwenna closed her eyes, she could imagine a slender boy talking rather than a man grown. “Our plan went all wrong,” he continued, “and they showed up to save us.”

“Yeah, but showed up from
where
?” Qora stabbed an accusatory finger at Gwenna. “They already
admitted
they're Kettral.”

“When we left the Islands,” Gwenna replied grimly, “being Kettral wasn't something people tried to hide.”

“Left the Islands to go where?” Qora demanded. “On what bird? On what orders? For all we know, you're working with Rallen.”

Gwenna stared. “Would we be hip-deep in a mangrove swamp right now if we were working for Jakob fucking Rallen? If Rallen sent us to capture you, we would have captured you and brought you back to Rallen.”

“Unless he sent you to spy.”

Gwenna bit down on her retort. The woman was paranoid, but then, months living out of cellars and caves, of glancing up each time a hawk-shaped shadow slid across the sky … that would make a person twitchy.