The Last Mortal Bond (83 page)

“I'll take it,” the Flea replied. “How long will the fuses burn?”

“Half a morning,” the Aphorist replied. “I'll light 'em when we hear the horses. The flame will be underground. He won't see anything. Won't smell anything.”

“Half a morning,” the Flea said grimly, “means we need to hold that wall for half a morning. How much you have left, Sig?” he asked.

Newt translated the leach's response. “She'll be flooded in power when the time comes, but she's been awake two days now, and on the move for all of it. She'll only be able to pull a little from her well. Any more would drown her.”

“All right,” the Flea said. “Get behind the walls. Get some sleep. Newt—let's see about rigging some scare charges down in the field, see if we can get the horses to balk.”

Valyn was so intent on the conversation that he didn't notice the steps approaching along the top of the wall until they were a dozen paces off. He turned, half expecting Huutsuu, but the gait was all wrong, as was the smell—raw nerves rather than Huutsuu's characteristic resolve. Instead of the warm, rank scent of horse and fur, the person smelled of oiled steel, weariness.

“I'm sorry to interrupt, sir.” One of the Annurian legionaries. “I was ordered to this section of the wall.”

Valyn spread his hands. “All yours.”

He didn't feel like talking, but he didn't feel like moving. If the poor bastard wanted to guard the wall, he was welcome to it. For a long time the two of them stood a couple of paces apart, unmoving. Valyn tried listening for the horses that would be thundering down out of the north, but he could hear only the hack of axes and the cursing of soldiers as they worked, the rush of the river off to the west and the intermittent shrieking of the wind.

“You really think they're dead?” the soldier asked finally. “The men we left up north?”

He offered the questions slowly, quietly, as though afraid to ask them, as though he didn't really want to hear the answers. Valyn blew out an irritated breath.

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

Valyn pointed over the wall toward Sigrid. “She's here, which means she's not there, which means your friends don't have a leach to shield them anymore. You've seen Balendin and the Urghul fight, so you tell me: You think your friends are alive?”

“There's always a chance. A hope.”

“You're hoping for the wrong thing. You should be
hoping
they're dead, because if they're not, then Balendin has them, and you know what he does with his prisoners.”

They were cruel words, maybe too cruel, but there wasn't anything to be gained by dodging the facts. The man sounded young, but half the people wrapped up in the fucking war were young. The legionary had fought the Urghul. He could hear the truth. He could face it.

Valyn wanted to turn away, to forget the man, to take up his silent watch once more, but behind him the soldier's breathing had gone rough and ragged.

“Those 'Kent-kissing bastards,” the legionary managed. The air smelled of tears and sweat. “I'll kill them.
I'll murder them
.”

Valyn closed his eyes. The young soldier's grief was thick as early morning mist. Valyn wanted to step clear of it, to find some other place on the wall where there was only the stone and the wind, but there was no other place. The Annurians were preparing, readying weapons, testing out the jagged rocks that Valyn himself had balanced on the ramparts in preparation for the attack. There were people everywhere. There was grief everywhere. You could walk forever and not escape it, could cross rivers, continents, seas, only to find new cities filled with the bereaved, every life shattered in some awful way, every man and woman weeping.

“They kill your friend?” he asked. His own voice sounded rough, callous, half a step from mockery.

The soldier didn't reply. Sobs rocked him. Nothing unusual there—men cried in battle, before, during, after—and if Valyn was lucky, the crying would be the worst of it. The guy would cough it out and move on. If he was lucky, there wouldn't be a story to go with the sobs. He wasn't lucky.

“My brother,” the soldier said finally. “My brother was with them.”

As though that single word—
brother
—were some kind of kenning, the darkness plastered across Valyn's eyes shifted, filling with the memory of Kaden. According to the Flea, he was still alive, had made it back to Annur somehow, had even managed to pull the empire out from underneath Adare's feet. Before Andt-Kyl, the discovery would have filled Valyn with relief, with pride. Now, when he probed his mind for those emotions, he found nothing, just a dark pit where the emotion should have been, lightless, bottomless, cold as winter stone. He could see Kaden's face, could hear his brother's voice in his mind, but behind it there was only that emptiness.

“What was your brother's name?” Valyn asked.

“Oberan,” the soldier replied.

Valyn turned to face the young man. “Well then, you'd better hope that Oberan is dead.”

*   *   *

The thunder started at dawn, not a thunder of the sky torn apart by lightning, not an intermittent growl punctuated by silence, but a low, constant rumbling: the thunder of hooves so far to the north that Valyn had to strain to make it out, but growing always closer. He rose from the chilly corner of the fort where he had spent the night alone, felt his way along the broken passage, then outside and up onto the wall. Mist was rising off the swamps to the east—thick as smoke, wet and vegetal—but either the sun was obscured by clouds or it was still too low to feel the heat.

The legionaries had spent the night on the walls—their snoring a softer counterpoint to the rumbling in the north—and as he walked among them Valyn thought about sounding the alarm, then discarded the idea. By his own vague reckoning, the Urghul were at least ten miles off. Probably there was something else that could be done to the fort, some final preparation to make, but all the crucial work was finished, and besides, the odds were against any of the sleeping men ever walking away from those walls. The dreams they dreamed as the morning mist shifted over the fort—their nightmares or the bright and fragile worlds to which they had escaped—those dreams would likely be their last.

Valyn stepped carefully over the snoring forms, past them, continuing along the top of the wall until he reached one of the towers, then climbed the crumbling stairs to the top. There was nothing to see, not for him, but the air smelled lighter there, less like dirt and piss and hopelessness.

The Flea found him there just after the sun finally broke through the morning cloud. Valyn recognized the Wing leader's gait as he climbed the stone stairs to the tower—a little heavier on the right foot, as though some old wound had never fully healed—recognized that solid, steady heartbeat. The man joined him at the crenellations. He stood just a pace away, but remained silent a long time. The eastern forest was alive with birds—nuthatches and chickadees, jays and nightjars—a thousand threads of song. Valyn tried to untangle them, to pick one melody apart from the rest.

“You should go,” the Flea said finally. “There's nothing you can do here except get in the way.”

Valyn let go of the birdsong. The hooves to the north were drowning it out anyway.

“I won't get in the way.”

“You're blind.”

“Only when I'm not fighting. Only when I'm not about to die.”

The Flea fell silent for a while, then handed him a strip of dried meat. “Then eat.”

Valyn shook his head. “I survived in these forests a long time before we came to find you.”

“Good for you. You still need to eat.”

Valyn turned to face the man, measured out the next words, trying to keep his growing rage in check. “You have no idea what I need.”

Anyone else would have recoiled at his tone. The Flea didn't flinch. There wasn't even a hint of fear-smell on him. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I do. I watched you grow up, Valyn. I trained you.”

“You trained an idiotic kid who was soft as summer grass. Trust me when I tell you this:
I am not him
.”

“I know that. It's a shame.”

For a moment Valyn lost his words. “A shame?” he managed finally. “It's a
shame
? That kid was weak. He was slow. He was stupid. I may not have eyes, but back then I was fucking
blind
. I lost my bird, lost my Wing, sat by while Laith died, and for what? So I could let my sister stab me. So I could fail to kill il Tornja, and fall off a tower.”

His breathing was hot and ragged in his chest, his heart pounding as though he'd just raced five miles, but there was no stopping.

“I'm broken now, busted all to Hull, but I'm not
dumb
anymore. I'm not soft. If we fought now, you and I, the way we did in Assare, I'd take you apart, I'd cut you to fucking pieces.”

He hadn't meant to say it, but it was true. Even as he raged, he could feel the part of him that was not quite him, the part that was tainted by the slarn's strength gathering, coiling to strike. No one, not even the Flea, could stand against that.

“You trained me,” he went on, voice little more than a growl. “It just took me a year too long to learn what you were teaching.”

“No,” the Flea replied. “This is not it.”

“You don't believe me. That's fine. Wait until the Urghul get here.”

“I'm not talking about fighting.”

Valyn shook his head. “Then what
are
you talking about?”

The Flea was silent a long time.

“You know why I joined the Kettral?” he asked finally.

“Don't shovel me a steaming pile of shit about defending the empire, about Annurian justice.”

“I won't. I was a kid in Ganaboa. I barely realized I
was
part of the empire. I joined the Kettral because of Finn.”

Valyn's stomach lurched inside him. “Blackfeather Finn.”

He could hear the Flea's nod, the scrape of whiskers over wool. “He was from Ganaboa, too—the son of a ship captain. People forgot about that, that Ganaboa part, because his skin was so light. Anyway, when the Kettral showed up looking for recruits, Finn went. And because I loved him, I went.”

Valyn was mute. The forest birds had gone quiet, as though they, too, heard the distant rumble of the coming horde.
Love
. It was a word he'd never heard from the Kettral, something the Eyrie worked hard to train out of them long before the Trial.

“I didn't have the words for it then—we were kids. He was my best friend. I couldn't imagine staying in Ganaboa without him. Finn was brilliant with that bow of his, even back then. When the Kettral came to the island, came with their contest and their offer of training for the winners, Finn was certain the Eyrie would want him, and he was right.

“I, on the other hand, didn't know shit, barely knew what end of a knife to hold. Everyone told me I was stupid, that I was going to get the life kicked out of me in the ring while half of Ganaboa laughed, and that would be it.” He paused for a moment at the memory. “They weren't wrong. Not about the ass-kicking, anyway. Thing was, they didn't realize how bad I wanted it. I figured if I just kept getting up, if I just kept fighting, the Kettral would have to take me, and if they took me, I could stay with Finn. By the end of that fight I'd broken three ribs, two fingers, and an ankle. I had half of some older kid's ear in my mouth when they hauled me off. I couldn't walk for a month afterward, but it got me onto the Islands.

“I thought I was done, then, but you know how it is—I wasn't close to done. There was the training, the Trial, the early missions, more training. It's enough to drive a person crazy. I watched it drive men crazy, and women. I watched it break them.”

“But it didn't break you,” Valyn said, his voice rusted.

“For me it was easy.”

“Easy.” Valyn coughed.

The Flea paused. “Uncomplicated, at least,” he amended. “There was only ever one thing to think about: if I trained hard enough, if I was good enough, I could be with Finn. If the shit hit, I could keep him safe. That's what I thought about every single morning swimming those 'Kent-kissing laps around the sound. That's what I thought about all those long days swinging blades in the ring. All the barrel drops. All the quick-grabs and map study and language lessons.
This might be the thing,
I thought,
that keeps him safe. This might be the thing that saves him.
”

He fell silent. Along the wall, the legionaries were calling out questions and orders, readying themselves for the attack. The Flea didn't seem to notice.

“And now?” Valyn asked quietly.

“Now? I'm old. Finn's gone. But the habits are there. I don't think I could wake up late if I tried.” The words were soft, but Valyn could hear the grief vibrating in the other man's voice.

“Why are you telling me this?” Valyn asked.

The Flea waited a few heartbeats before answering. “A couple reasons, I guess. The first is to apologize. It didn't have to go down like that in Assare, even after Finn died. I lost control, of myself, then my Wing.”

“You didn't lose control,” Valyn said. “I dropped my blades, and you let me
live
.”

“I was after the Skullsworn, not you.” The Flea shook his head again. “But I would have gone through you if I had to. I would have killed you all to get at her. It was a mistake. If that night had played out differently, we might have saved a lot of other lives.”

Valyn couldn't speak. He'd been carrying Assare inside him like a jagged stone for months, the guilt of it weighing him down, its edges shredding anything that it touched. In all that time he'd never once paused to consider another possibility—that maybe the blame wasn't all his. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but the Flea was already talking again.