The Last Mortal Bond (46 page)

“No one's asking
you
to do it,” Gwenna pointed out. “The two of you have already been through the Trial. You passed. Remember?”

Manthe just shuddered, her eyes distant, focused on some remembered horror. Gwenna had the feeling she could reach out and knock the woman over with a gentle push. She could have, that was, if Hobb wasn't standing there, looming over Gwenna, a protective arm around his wife's shoulders. Since that first showdown in the cavern, neither of the two Kettral had challenged Gwenna again. When she decided to go scouting, she went scouting. When her Wing started trying to train the rebels, Manthe and Hobb stayed out of the way, watching the long sessions of archery and bladework with cautious, guarded looks.

Early on, Gwenna had tried to enlist them. “Feel free to help,” she'd suggested. “Even after spending the last decade on Arim, you've got more experience than the rest of this lot.”

“We have more experience than
you,
” Hobb had pointed out, his voice hard.

Gwenna had managed not to hit him. She didn't even retort. She just spread her arms, a gesture she hoped looked welcoming. “As I said, I could use your help getting the others up to speed.”

Manthe had only glared at her, eyes bright, almost feral behind her stringy, graying hair.

“I don't think so,” Hobb had replied slowly. “You wanted to run this show. You run it.”

Those had been their last words on the matter.

It was just as well, Gwenna concluded, when her anger finally cooled. The older Kettral had gone through the training, had passed the Trial, had even flown actual missions, but they were broken, shattered. Hobb was too protective of his wife, and Manthe saw monsters in every shadow, heard death and disaster on every breath of air eddying through the cavern. The rebels needed backbone more than they did bladework, and they weren't likely to get it from Manthe and Hobb. The two veterans didn't go anywhere—there wasn't anywhere to go—but they kept to their corner of the cave, to their own grimy blankets. They watched constantly, dark eyes flickering with the firelight, but they had made no move to interfere. Until now.

“You cannot
do
this,” Manthe hissed again, half raising a clawed hand, as though to ward off a physical attack.

“I can,” Gwenna said, “and I'm going to. I already said you don't need to be part of it.”

“It's not about us,” Hobb said. He gestured the length of the cavern, to where the would-be soldiers were paired up, sparring. “These kids…”

“They're not kids,” Gwenna said. “Every one of them is older than I am. A few of them are older than
you
.”

“Doesn't matter,” Hobb insisted, jaw tight. “They're not ready.”

“They'd be a lot
more
ready, you idiot,” Gwenna snapped, “if you quit telling them they're not.”

The man stared at her with open contempt. “Listen to yourself. You lucked through the Trial. You managed to survive barely a year off the Islands—a year in which half your Wing
died
—and you come back thinking you're Kettral. Thinking you know the first thing about what it is to be a soldier. What it takes.”

“I'll tell you one thing I know,” Gwenna shot back. “Until we got here, you were fucking hiding. You were losing.”

“There is a difference,” Manthe snarled, still clutching her husband's arm as she leaned forward, “between courage and recklessness.”

“And which one is it when you hide in a cave letting your people get killed by slarn?”

“We are
assessing,
” the woman hissed. “There is
intelligence.…”

“We gathered more intelligence in the last week,” Gwenna snapped, cutting her off, “than you did in all the months since Rallen took over. At some point you have to stop assessing and start killing people.”

Manthe stared at Gwenna, thin lips parted in disbelief. Gwenna could hear her panting, her heartbeat galloping along just at the edge of panic. Then she turned to her husband, voice low and beseeching. “She's going to get us killed, Hobb. She's crazy, and it's going to kill us all.”

Hobb grimaced, then shifted slightly in her clutches.
Trying to keep his sword hand clear,
Gwenna observed. Talal and Annick were working with the washouts at the other end of the cave, the leach murmuring quiet advice, Annick smacking knuckles and elbows with the flat of her blade to emphasize the price of error. Gwenna thought she could kill Hobb in a fair fight, but that might be exactly the recklessness Manthe was ranting on about. The man had the height, the reach, and judging from the muscle corded in his arms, the strength.
Save the fight for Rallen,
Gwenna reminded herself.
This is not a risk you need to take
.

“Look,” she said, holding her palms up. “All I want is to beat Rallen and those sons of bitches he has flying for him. To do that, we need every advantage, and you both know that the Trial confers major advantages. You've been bitten by the slarn and eaten the egg. You know what it does to you.”

Hobb glanced over at his wife. Her eyes were wide as lamps and her lips twitched silently.

Gwenna ransacked her memory for recollections of the Flea, for that quiet voice that always rode the edge between confidence and indifference. “I'm not asking permission,” she said. “This is happening.” It didn't come out sounding like the Flea, but it would have to do. Hobb wasn't going for his blades, at least. “I told you first,” she continued quietly, “as a courtesy. You're Kettral, and I thought you might want to help.”

Manthe shook her head frantically. Hobb looked down at her for a long time, then put an arm around her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her furrowed brow. The gesture was incongruously soft, private, as though they were alone somewhere, standing on the veranda of a house, maybe, or in front of a quietly crackling fire. Gwenna had been ready to fight Hobb, even to kill him, but the sudden and unexpected intimacy caught her off guard.

“I could use your help,” she said awkwardly.

Hobb kept his arm around his wife, but when he met Gwenna's eyes again, his voice was hard. “Something wrong with your hearing?” he growled. “I already told you: no.”

Gwenna stared at him a moment, then shook her head. “Then stay out of the fucking way.”

 

25

Every day, as they nudged their horses forward through the mossy trunks of the old trees, Valyn swore to himself that it was over, that he was finished, that when the sun's heat dropped beneath the western peaks he would shackle his sick lust, wrap himself in bison hide, close his ruined eyes, and sleep. Almost every night, he failed.

Traveling with Huutsuu was like standing chest-deep in the surf as a hurricane approached; between the swells he could keep his feet, hold his head above water, breathe freely, but when the waves came there was no way to avoid the whole oceanic weight tugging him under, under and out, away from familiar footing, far from any shore he might hope to recognize. Half the time he thought that she would drag him down and kill him. That first night, for instance, when she finally pulled the knife free of his chest. Or the second night, when they fucked so close to the fire that the heat blistered his skin. Or the third, or the fourth …

Sometimes he thought
he
would be the one to kill
her,
even that he
had
killed her. One night, as the wind scythed down off the mountains, cutting through the rough trunks of the trees, he wrapped a leather belt around her neck, dragging it tighter and tighter as she shuddered, arched her back, choked out a moan, then went suddenly slack. She was only out for heartbeats. Valyn remembered his training well enough to know the lack of air wasn't going to kill her unless he kept going, kept pulling, and yet he discovered, horrified, that there was a part of him that
wanted
to keep going, wanted to break her, destroy her.

Or to have her destroy him. Hurting or being hurt, killing or being killed—it was all part of the same desperate currency, the same cold, heavy coin.

Most nights he half hoped she would just finish it, finish him. It would be a relief to be cut free finally from the tatters of his own life, a release, and for some reason that release seemed to lie through Huutsuu. The Kettral had offered him a path—a straight road of discipline and sacrifice—but he had strayed from that path. His only road now, the only way through the wilderness, was one of violence and pain, but even as he walked it, a faint voice whispered in the back of his brain, a human voice trapped inside the beast he had become, asking the same questions over and over:
What kind of man does this? What kind of man
enjoys
it? What have you become, Valyn hui'Malkeenian? What have you made yourself into?

When he let the belt drop, Huutsuu would lie corpse-still and warm a long time, reeking of blood, and sex, and leather, then shudder into life all over again, her strong hands seizing him, twisting, scratching her demands into his ravaged skin, and he would grind out that questioning voice like a fire's last ember.

Sometimes—when her knife cut too deep, when he bent her arm behind her to the point of breaking—he could see. It was the same sight that came with mortal violence, that precise etching of darkness on darkness, Hull's twisted vision, a rush every bit as strong, as overwhelming, as the final convulsions of their sex. Just as fleeting. When the gravest danger passed, so did the engraved blackness of his non-sight, leaving him in darkness once more, with only Huutsuu's growling voice to guide him.

The Urghul woman knew her work. She understood just where to put a blade to hurt a man without crippling him, without killing him. When she bit his neck, her teeth closed just wide of the artery throbbing beneath the skin. Still, without the slarn's strength in his blood, Valyn's wounds would have left him unable to travel most days. As it was, he found himself limping to the horse each morning, fire from a dozen cuts blazing over his skin as he hauled himself into the saddle. That Huutsuu, likewise, managed to press ahead spoke volumes of her acquaintance with pain. Valyn could remember her mocking him back on the steppe when they first met, mocking him and the rest of his Wing for their softness. He had placed little stock in the words then. Now, at last, he understood; the woman did not simply endure her pain, she wore it like a cloak of fine cloth. She was a savage, worse than savage—but she lived her faith.

For all the carnal fury of the nights, the long, chill summer days riding north and west were mostly given over to silence. Valyn's horse followed a few paces behind Huutsuu's, and yet they barely spoke. The animal lust that he smelled pouring off her in the night vanished when the sun rose, replaced with a granitic resolve, a fixed and unwavering purpose. If she shared any of his confusion, his regret, his turmoil and shame, he couldn't hear it in her even breathing or steady heartbeat, couldn't smell it on her skin. Beneath the bright eye of the sun, they were warriors going to do the work of warriors, nothing more.

“You understand,” Valyn said to her one day when he grew tired of listening to the horses' hooves on the stone, to the steady swish of their tails, to the breathing of the Urghul all around him, “that if we ever find the Flea, he'll probably kill us all.”

“Not all,” Huutsuu replied. “It takes time to kill thirty warriors, time I will use to speak.”

“Fine. It will still mean buying that time with the lives of your warriors.”

“So there will be a price.” She shrugged, leather sliding over skin. “Only a fool believes a thing of value will be laid in her lap with no reckoning.” He could feel her eyes on him. “Still. Your presence here may slow this Flea. He may pause before killing.”

“Maybe,” Valyn conceded. “Probably not. Kettral tend to come in fast and brutal. There's not a lot of exchanging names or studying faces.”

Huutsuu shrugged again. “Then women and men will bleed.”

She smelled almost eager.

*   *   *

Halfway between midnight and dawn,
Hendran wrote,
most people are either sleeping, fucking, or drunk. It's a good time to attack.

It was old advice, but sound, and the Flea took it, hitting the small Urghul camp sometime between midnight and dawn. Huutsuu had posted guards, but guards were little use against men and women trained to move silently through the dark, whose own senses were heightened beyond all normal proportion by the eggs of the slarn. Valyn himself was asleep, shivering through nightmare after nightmare, when a starshatter exploded fifty paces distant, ripping him from his dreams.

His eyes slammed open at the sound. An old reflex—useless now, stupid, just opening a door from darkness into darkness. He extended a tentative hand, groping in the black until he brushed the rough bark of the hemlock's trunk. He'd climbed a dozen feet into the fork of the old tree just after nightfall, wedged himself there before falling asleep. It was hardly the strongest defensive position, but it was what he had. The Urghul camp would have been warmer, but he had no intention of sleeping among the horsemen—Huutsuu might kill him, but he didn't intend to offer himself up to the other bastards, or to the Flea, if the Wing leader finally came calling. Outside the camp, he'd at least be able to make a fight of it. Now, it seemed, the decision had saved his life.

The Urghul were shouting, screaming, and Valyn could smell blood in the air, thick, and hot, and wet, as he dropped out of the tree, landed awkwardly, then straightened up. He half drew one of the axes at his belt, then let it be. If he'd wanted to stay alive, he could have stayed in the fucking tree. The whole point in coming all this way was to try to make contact with the Flea. If it didn't work, well then, he would die.