Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (30 page)

“Valyn,” she said, nodding curtly. Her eyes, blue as arctic ice, never left his face.

He tensed. Normally he’d have the advantage in close-quarters combat, but even sitting up took a major effort; he wasn’t going to be wrestling her to the ground, not in his condition. He thought about calling for Ren, but the medic was over in the mess hall taking his dinner and filling yet another bowl of stew for Valyn. It would have to be the belt knife, then.

The knife lay beside the remains of an apple on the wooden table beside the bed. He figured the odds at about half that he could reach it and throw before Annick fished an arrow out of her quiver, and he counted himself lucky at that. It seemed like a long time since he’d had a chance at a fair fight.

“What do you want?” he asked, shifting slowly toward the table, freeing his right hand from the blankets in the process.

“I didn’t try to kill you,” she said simply.

Valyn barked a laugh that sent a stab of pain through his chest. “You’re here to
apologize
?”

Annick tilted her head to one side, considering the question. “No,” she responded after a moment. “I’m here to tell you I didn’t try to kill you.”

Valyn went for the knife. He was slower than he’d expected, slower than he hoped, but the ’Kent-kissing thing was only a few feet away. If he could just … Before he’d even extended his arm, Annick nocked, drew, and released. The blade went skittering away across the floor, while an arrow sprouted in its place, still quivering from the impact. Valyn watched it go still, then let his hand fall. That was it, then. The sniper had him pinned down and there wasn’t a thing he could do.

She considered him calmly, another arrow already nocked to her string. It seemed like a poor way to die—murdered in an infirmary cot—but then, he supposed all the ways looked pretty poor to the person doing the dying.

“So you’re part of it,” he said wearily. It was a vague relief to put a face to the conspiracy at last, even if it wasn’t the face he’d expected.

Annick paused before responding. “Part of what?”

“Whatever the fuck it is,” he said, gesturing weakly with a hand. “My father. Me. Kaden.” He closed his eyes at the thought of his brother, unwarned, unprepared, going about the strange, simple life that had been decreed for him right up until the moment someone put a blade in his back. It wouldn’t be hard, all the way out there at the end of the empire.

Annick tapped at her bowstring with a finger. “You’re not making sense. Has the medic given you something to dull the pain?”

Valyn started to respond, then checked himself. Maybe she was playing games, taunting him during his final moments. On the other hand, Annick didn’t play games. She seemed to have only two goals—training or killing—and if she really wanted to kill him, she would have shot his neck a moment earlier, not his knife.

“Why did you come here?” he asked guardedly, a sick hope blooming inside him.

“To tell you I didn’t try to kill you,” she said for the third time, eyes hard as chips of glass. “If I wanted to kill you, there are better ways than the middle of the day in the middle of a contest.”

“Well, it’s a ’Kent-kissing good thing that you weren’t shooting this well yesterday,” Valyn said, gesturing to the arrow lodged in the table. “You would have put that chisel point right through the back of my head rather than my shoulder.”

Annick narrowed her eyes. Were it not for the insanity of the notion, Valyn would have thought he’d insulted her professional pride. “The tips were wrong,” she said finally. “They threw off the shots.”

Valyn considered that. “You mean you thought you were firing stunners rather than chisel points.” It made an unexpected sort of sense. The difference in the weight and shape of an arrowhead
could
account for the missed shots, especially over that sort of range.

“I mean,” Annick corrected him, “the heads are wrong.” She jerked her chin toward the one sticking from the side table. “That’s what they ripped out of you. I found it in the other room when I came in. It’s the other reason I came.”

Valyn stared, first at her, then at the arrow. The brown stain on the shaft was blood, he realized,
his
blood. Awkwardly, he fumbled it free from the grain of the tabletop.

“It’s a standard chisel point,” he said, holding it up for her to see.

“Exactly,” Annick responded, refusing to elaborate.

Valyn returned his attention to the arrow. There was nothing unusual aside from the stains. He’d probably fired thousands just like it in his training. Except … “You don’t use the standard head,” he said, realization dawning. “You hammer your own.”

The sniper nodded.

“How did you shoot a standard chisel instead of your own stunner without knowing the difference?” Valyn asked, as confused as he was wary. “How did it even end up in your quiver?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, her voice flat, matter-of-fact, unreadable. Her whole ’Kent-kissing body was unreadable. Kettral trained from an early age to see a foe’s intention in the way he stood, the way he carried his weapons, the angle of his eyes. There were a hundred things to look for—whitened knuckles on a sword hilt, raised shoulders, the flick of a tongue on dry lips. The tiniest twitch of an eye could signal imminent attack or the possibility of a bluff. Annick, however, might have been standing in line at a butcher’s shop or considering a statue on the Annurian Godsway. If she was concerned at having nearly killed the brother of the Emperor, she didn’t show it. She hadn’t moved from the doorway, where she stood with her bow at her side, posture loose but ready, her thin, childlike face inscrutable as the blank white walls.

Valyn rolled wearily onto his side. His mind ached from trying to make sense of it all, and his body ached, too. In the course of his pathetic exertions, his wound had broken open, seeping blood down the front of his chest, stabbing him whenever he drew a breath. It no longer seemed quite so likely Annick was trying to kill him, at least not right away.

“What about the knot?” he asked wearily. “The one you tied during the drowning test?”

“Double bowline. Hard to untie in those circumstances, but not impossible.”

Valyn watched her face. Still nothing. “You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked after a long pause.

“It’s the truth.”

“The truth,” Valyn said. “And what do you think I found, down there when I nearly drowned?”

“You found a double bowline,” she replied. “When you failed to untie it, you wanted to make some sort of excuse in front of Fane. That’s why you lied about the extra loops.” Her voice was devoid of emotion, as though lying to a superior officer and accusing a fellow cadet were both just tactics like any other tactics, to be judged by their success or failure. Nothing rattled her. Nothing surprised her.

“What about Amie?” he demanded, gambling on a sudden impulse. “Did you kill her?”

That, finally, got a reaction. Something dark and horrible passed across Annick’s eyes, a shadow of rage and destruction.

“We found her, you know,” Valyn continued, pressing the attack. “She was a pretty girl, but not after whoever killed her got finished.”

“She…,” Annick began, speechless for once, her slender features twisting. “She—”

“She what? She begged you to stop? She wasn’t supposed to die? She had it coming?” The words were an effort, each syllable tearing at the wound in his chest, but he kept at them, thrusting them at the sniper like knives, trying to keep her on the defensive, trying to force the retreat that would lead to the stumble. “I know you were seeing her that morning,” he continued. “Did you spend all day killing her?”

Annick half raised her bow, and Valyn thought for a moment that she was going to murder him after all. She was breathing hard suddenly, her fingers almost trembling. He stared, fear all but forgotten in his fascination, as she shuddered herself still. Then, without a word of explanation, she turned on her heel and disappeared through the door. For a long time, he just watched the empty doorway, trying in vain to recall the expression on her face.

When Ha Lin finally arrived hours later, she found him in the same position.

Valyn hadn’t bothered to light the small lamp by his side, and in the gathering dusk, all he saw was her silhouette at first, the tight curve of her hip, the swell of her breast as she stood against the bleached wall. He could smell her, the light scent of salt and sweat he’d come to recognize over a hundred training missions.

“Lin,” he began, shaking the memory of Annick clear from his mind, “you’ll never believe what—”

The words died in his throat as she stepped over to the bed, into the fading light from the window. Her lip had been split open and a cruel gash sliced across her forehead. The wounds were a day old, but they were brutal nonetheless.

“What in ’Shael’s name—,” he began, reaching out for her.

She recoiled violently, jerking back. “Don’t touch me,” she said, voice hard but abstracted, as though she were speaking from the depth of sleep.

Valyn fell back against the pillow, eyes burning, heart hammering in his chest. “I asked Ren,” he said. “He told me you were fine.”

“Fine?” she asked, glancing down at her hands as though seeing them for the first time. “Yeah, I suppose I’m fine.”

“What
happened
to you?” Valyn demanded, reaching out a hand once more.

She turned to the window, ripped a scab off her knuckle, and flicked it out into the night.

“Got careless,” she said finally.

“Bull
shit,
Lin,” Valyn snapped. “You didn’t get those bruises tripping on the trail. Now, what in Hull’s name happened up there?”

The fire in his voice burned away her lassitude at last, and she met his anger with her own. “Sami Yurl and Balendin Ainhoa happened,” she replied grimly, her mouth twisting into a scowl or a sob. “They were
both
up on the west bluffs.”

“And they did—” He waved a hand weakly toward her face. “—this?” His hand curled into a hard fist. “Those bastards. Those ’Shael-spawned, ’Kent-kissing bastards. I knew I shouldn’t have let—”

She started laughing then, a low, ugly laugh. “Let me
what
?
Let
me walk around the Islands by myself?
Let
me go out after dark?” She shook her head. “Maybe you shouldn’t
let
me play with sharp things?”

“I didn’t mean it that way—,” he began, then stopped, a sickening thought boiling up inside him. “They didn’t—” He wasn’t sure how to say the words. “Did they—?”

“Rape me?” she said, raising a bruised eyebrow. “Is that what you want to ask? If they raped me?”

He nodded silently, dumb before the possibility.

She turned and spat out the narrow window. “No, Valyn,” she said. “They didn’t fucking rape me.”

Relief washed through him. “Well, that’s—”

“That’s
what
?” she snarled. “Good? It’s
good
that they didn’t rip my blacks off and fuck me? What a
solace
!” Lamplight flickered in her eyes as though they had caught fire. “They shoved my face in the dirt, slashed me across the ribs, broke my nose and probably a rib, but at least my precious
cunt
is intact.”

“Lin—,” he began.

“Oh, fuck
you,
Valyn, you
idiot,
” she spat. She was crying, he realized, but the words came out fast and sharp. “The point is they
could
have done whatever they wanted. They
could
have raped me, or killed me, tossed my body in the ocean. Whatever. There was nothing I could do to stop them.” She took a long, shuddering breath, then scrubbed away the tears with the back of her hand.

“Why?” Valyn asked. “Why did they do it?”

“They said it was payback,” she said, the sobs and the fury suddenly gone, replaced by a flat monotone. “Said it was to remind me what happens when someone steps into the ring against them.”

“But they
won
the fight,” Valyn said, his mind spinning.

“They won, all right,” Lin replied, nodding wearily. “They won, and they won, and they won.”

“I should have been there,” Valyn said, struggling to sit up.

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you listening to me at all?” She turned slowly to face him. “Honest to Hull, in some ways you’re just as bad as those two bastards.”

The words stabbed him more viciously than the wound in his shoulder. “What? I’m saying I wanted to
help
you, to have your back.”

She took another deep breath, then spoke to him slowly, as though to a stupid child. “They attacked me because I stepped outside the boundaries they set up for me, because I wouldn’t
behave.”
She shook her head again wearily. “And now you’re doing the same thing, telling me I shouldn’t go here or there, telling me that I should check with you before I lace up my ’Kent-kissing breeches.”

“All right,” Valyn said. “Fine. I get it. I’m sorry.”

“No,” she replied. “You do not get it. You cannot follow me everywhere. You cannot watch me every night while I sleep.”

“I can help,” he said stubbornly.

“Fuck. That. I’m a soldier, same as you. Same as Sami Yurl.” She had worried off another scab as she talked and stared down at it, trembling. One by one, she flexed her fingers, watching the blood well up. “I got careless is all,” she said finally. “It won’t happen again.”

Valyn felt a cold stone settle in his gut. His shoulder throbbed, but he didn’t care a shit for his shoulder.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “Whatever you need. You just tell me.”

“I don’t … I thought I needed to talk to you. I thought it would help.” She flicked the blood from her fingers. “Stupid of me. How could it help? The thing’s all over, all done. You might be an Emperor’s son, but you can’t stuff the sand back in the hourglass.” She turned her head and met his eyes at last. “There’s no going back—just forward. What I need is some time.”

“No,” he replied reflexively. “Lin…”

He reached out toward her one more time, but she slipped past his grip.