Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (37 page)

“So we’re back to caution and waiting for Kaden?” he asked.

“No,” Adare replied firmly. “We’re thinking of a third path. Let’s go back to the trial. How did Uinian avoid burning?”

“I hope you’re not going to tell me that he really is the consort of some mythical goddess.”

Adare frowned. “You don’t believe in Intarra?”

“Do you?” Il Tornja spread his hands. “I believe what I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears. Men have won and lost battles for a thousand reasons, but never because a god came down to take part in the fray.”

“That’s not what the histories say. During the Csestriim wars—”

“The Csestriim are a child’s tale, as are the gods. Think about the look on Uinian’s face going into the trial.”

Adare nodded slowly. “He
knew
he was going to survive. He didn’t have a moment of doubt.”

“And if you were counting on the favor of a goddess no one has seen or heard from in a thousand years, even if you thought she was going to bail you out, don’t you think you’d be at least a little nervous?”

Adare stood up, her agitation demanding some form of physical expression. She paced to the far wall of the library, trying to sort and sift the facts and suspicions. Beyond the clear stone, the sun was setting over the city, and she could feel its rays warm on her cheeks and lips. When she turned, Ran was standing by her side, though she had not heard him approach.

“He’s a leach,” she said. It was the only explanation.

The
kenarang
considered the suggestion with pursed lips.

“I’ve read all the histories,” Adare pressed on. “Linnae and Varren, even that endless commentary by Hengel. This is the sort of thing a leach can do, if his well is strong and close.”

“It makes sense,” Ran agreed finally, nodding slowly at the idea. “If you could get the people to believe that, they would tear him apart themselves.”

“But how?” Adare said, fingernails biting into her palms. “The people believe that Intarra loves him. How do you distinguish between divine favor and some leach’s kenning?”

“It’s
all
kenning. There
is
no divine favor.”

“
You
believe that, but they don’t. The man has become practically a hero overnight. We can’t kill him without disgracing him first, without revealing his secret in a way that no one can doubt or deny. When we’ve shown him for a liar and a leach, then it won’t even matter what we do. He’ll be finished.”

“As you’ve already pointed out,” Ran replied, putting a hand on her shoulder as though to slow down the flood of her words, “Intarra’s rewards are irritatingly difficult to distinguish from a leach’s kenning.”

“I know,” Adare said, biting her lip. “I know.”

The sun had dipped under the horizon, bloodying the sky, but her cheeks still burned with the last rays or their own inner heat. There had to be a way. Her father would have seen it. If she could just come at the matter from the right angle, attack it from the proper direction. Every problem had a solution, if she could just …

“Leave it,” Ran said, trying to guide her back toward the room. “Sleep on it. Sometimes the ideas come only when the mind is gone. You have to give them space.”

Adare turned to stare at him, at that fine chiseled face, those deep eyes. There was something in what he’d said, something—

“Yes,” she said, a thrill running through her, the shape of plan suggesting itself. “Yes! That’s exactly how we’ll do it.” She smiled wide. “But I’ll need someone good with poisons.”

Ran frowned. “You just got done telling me that we can’t just kill him.”

“Oh,” she said, hopeful for the first time since her father’s death, “I’m going to do so much more than just kill him.”

And then, to the
kenrang
’s evident surprise, she leaned close to kiss him full and thoroughly on the mouth, the fire inside burning hotter still, and spreading.

26

Valyn rose early, bathed in the cold water from the sluice outside his barracks, shaved with his belt knife, then donned his best Kettral blacks. A stiffness had settled into his joints overnight, the rigid ache of muscles used past the limit of endurance, then left to tighten, and his legs protested as he limped between the buildings, past the mess hall, past command, across the great empty muster ground at the center of the compound, and up the trail toward the small rise overlooking the harbor. On a knoll a few hundred paces to the east, the spreading tenebral oak clawed at the sky with its gnarled limbs, but today the Kettral would pass by the shrine of their patron and pay homage to a different god. The soldiers referred to the stone ledge at the top of this small rise as Ananshael’s Table, and it was here that they commemorated their dead.

Others joined Valyn as he went, all Kettral now, a small stream of black flowing uphill. Gent walked a few paces ahead, favoring his left leg heavily. Gwenna followed half a dozen yards behind, her right arm in a sling. No one spoke. After the strain of the Trial, the weight of words was too great, their purpose too feeble.

For eight years, when Valyn had imagined this day, he had imagined celebration, laughter, backslapping, and, capping it all off, tankards upon tankards of beer over on Hook. This was the day they were finally Kettral; after eight years,
this
was the day they had proved themselves worthy successors to the line of iron men and women.

More recently—since the mysterious warning from the dying Aedolian—he had felt an even greater urgency to be done with the test. Those who survived the Trial were assigned to Wings in the roles for which they had trained, which meant, after a brief probational period, he would be commanding his own small group of soldiers and free, finally, to leave the Islands. Provided he was able to secure permission, he would be allowed to go after Kaden, to warn him. He’d thought about little else, over the preceding five weeks; certainly he had worried more for Kaden than he had for Ha Lin. Never in his worst foreboding had he imagined the Trial would prove her end.

Oh, she would be battered, maybe. He would be battered, too. That was all part of the fantasy—conjuring up the vicious but impotent wounds they would flash and flaunt, trading the stories of tests overcome, trials met, foes defeated. As it turned out, life with the Kettral didn’t line up very well with the stories. In the stories the soldiers traded gibes and offhand jests while dispatching the enemy with casual grace. In the stories the soldiers fucking
lived.

He crested the low hill and stared at the bier. The gravelly limestone of the Qirins wasn’t suitable for burial, and although the Kettral spent countless hours in underwater training and missions, no one wanted to be laid to rest in the icy blue black of the ocean depths. They burned their dead, those whose bodies returned, here on this headland, on the sharp scrap of limestone thrust up through the earth like a bone tearing through flesh.

Someone must have built the bier in the night, while he and the rest of his cohort slept their own deathlike sleep, hammering the planks together with a carpenter’s care, although the whole thing was fashioned only for the flame.
Like us,
Valyn thought to himself.
Trained, honed, drilled, and then … destroyed.

He forced himself to raise his eyes from the woodwork to the body atop it. Someone had taken the same care with Ha Lin that they had with the bier itself. She lay in her dress blacks, hands folded neatly across her chest, eyes closed, as though sleeping. The vicious gouges that marred her body, that had killed her in the end, were invisible now, hidden beneath the dark fabric. Her hair was combed back from her forehead in the way she used to wear it after climbing out of the waves after a long swim, and Valyn ached to step forward, to touch her face.

That was not, however, the way. Even in this, there was protocol to be observed, and he stood stiffly toward the side of the assembled group, his eyes fixed on Ha Lin’s smooth face, waiting for Daveen Shaleel to get on with it and make her speech. As he watched, a hand touched him lightly on the shoulder: Talal, another who had emerged from the Hole more battered than he had entered, his dark face somber.

“She would have made a good soldier,” he said quietly.

The anger came over Valyn all at once, hot and bright and unexpected. “She
was
a good soldier,” he snapped. “Better than the rest of this fucking lot,” he said, gesturing with a vague arm to the cadets who surrounded them.

Talal nodded, opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“What?” Valyn demanded, rounding on the leach. “
What?
You have some more insipid consolation to offer?” Despite the Eyrie’s tolerance, Ha Lin had never been able to bring herself to trust a leach, even Talal, and the fact that the youth stood before him now with no more than a few slashes and gouges while she lay dead on the hard wooden bier struck Valyn as some sort of crude final insult. “You went down into the Hole with your well and your
kennings,
” Valyn went on, gathering both speed and volume. “Protected by your secret, fucked-up powers. You might as well have had a dozen guards. We might as well have given you the egg right there on the island and skipped the ’Kent-kissing
act.
She went in there with nothing. With
nothing.
”

Talal’s face closed.

Gwenna laid a hand on Valyn’s arm, but he shook her off. “Get off me! All of you. Just get the fuck away from me.” He stepped away before he hit someone, giving himself space from the group and some air of his own, which he drank in deep gulps. His pulse raced, and it took him a moment to unclench his fist.

A few squalls chased along the southern horizon, dark smudges against the humid air. Now and again, a fork of lightning would lance down into the waves, followed long heartbeats later by the muffled thunder. Finally, Shaleel stepped in front of the bier. She considered Ha Lin for a long time, then turned to the assembled Kettral.

“Today we mark the loss of three of our number.”

Valyn had to keep reminding himself that Ha Lin wasn’t the only casualty. Nemmet and Quinn, a leach and a would-be flier, simply disappeared into the cavernous darkness. There were mutters that Fane, Sigrid, and the Flea had gone in looking for them once the Trial was over, but something—slarn, or rock fall, or the endless winding darkness itself—had simply swallowed the two cadets whole. Others had been luckier, but not lucky enough. Ferron found an egg, but lost his arm fighting free of a pack of slarn. Ennel had fallen from a ledge in the darkness and shattered his knee. The Eyrie would find jobs for them, of course, but neither would ever fly missions.

“When we arrive on these Islands,” Shaleel continued, “we give up the lives we might have led. We give up the comforts of home, the pleasures of peace and prosperity, the security of a life lived safely in the fold of the empire. In exchange we accept pain, and austerity, and, as this occasion reminds us, death. We give up our family, our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, blood of our blood, whom we may never see again. The men and women here become our family.”

Valyn looked over the assembled soldiers. Annick, without her bow for once, was looking out over the harbor, evidently more interested in the approaching weather than the funeral. Gwenna picked angrily at a long, ruddy scab running from her elbow to her wrist. Balendin, who wore new slashes across his face and hands, was eyeing Lin’s body with an inscrutable expression while Yurl managed to look smug and self-satisfied in spite of the bruise spreading across half his brow.
Some ’Kent-kissing family,
Valyn thought to himself grimly. Most of them he didn’t trust, and there were two he wanted to kill. Avenging the assault on Lin seemed pointless now, but then, the whole ’Shael-spawned endeavor had started to look a little pointless. Despite all his efforts, he was no closer to discovering the identities of the Kettral conspirators than he had been when Manker’s collapsed into the bay. One at a time he considered the various faces—Annick, Rallen, Yurl, Talal—each more unreadable than the last. He was
supposed
to be a warrior, a naked blade between the citizens of the empire and their foes, and yet all around him people kept dying, people he loved and those he barely knew. His stomach had twisted into a knot, torn between fury at his faceless enemy and disgust at his own failures.

The man still fighting last week’s battle will always lose to the man already fighting tomorrow’s,
he reminded himself. He still had a couple weeks of training once they assigned him his new Wing, a couple weeks before he could go after Kaden. In the meantime, cutting down Yurl and Balendin was something concrete, something he could hold on to.

“Although we’ll never know what happened to Nemmet Rantin and Quinn Leng, we know that Ha Lin Cha, who lies before us now, completed the Trial. She went down into the darkness and she found there what she sought. That makes her Kettral.”

The words should have mattered. The
title
should have mattered. Even if only briefly, Ha Lin had achieved her goal, had completed her Trial. A month earlier, Valyn would have said it was better to die a Kettral than a mere cadet, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. Dead was dead. Ananshael had her now, and the Lord of Bones wasn’t likely to treat her any more gently because Daveen Shaleel had decided she earned a special title.

“We honor all three fallen soldiers as Kettral,” Shaleel continued.

“
Ex-
Kettral,” Yurl quipped with a grin. “Last time I checked, dead girls don’t fly missions.”

Valyn shifted his gaze to the youth. The hot rage blazed in his veins, his fingers curled into fists, but he forced himself to remain still, clenching those fists until his fingernails bit into his palms, tensing his muscles to still their trembling, forcing himself to draw even breaths as his heart clamored inside his ribs. For a long while he felt like he might explode just like one of Gwenna’s starshatters, but then, as quickly as the fit had come upon him, it passed. The heat had burned away, leaving a cold, implacable hatred.