Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(10)

Hull’s Trial. Despite eight years of whispered speculation, neither Valyn nor the other cadets knew what it was any more than they had when they first arrived on Qarsh. It always seemed so distant, invisible as a ship beyond the cusp of the horizon. No one forgot it, but it was possible to ignore it for a while; after all, no one reached Hull’s Trial if he didn’t survive the years of training leading up to it. And yet, after all those years, it had come at last, like a debt long due. In a little over a month, Valyn and the others would earn the rank of full Kettral or they would die.

“Maybe we can start this morning’s parade of incompetence,” Fane began, tugging Valyn’s attention back to the present, “with Ha Lin’s assessment.” He gestured with a huge hand for her to begin. It was a standard exercise. The Kettral were always dragging cadets to fresh battlefields, the examination of which would both harden them to the sight of death and hone their tactical understanding.

“It was a night attack,” Lin replied, voice crisp and confident. “Otherwise, the sailors on deck would have seen their assailants. The raiding party came from starboard—you can see the gouges left by the grapples on the rails. When the—”

“Sweet ’Shael on a stick,” Fane interrupted, raising a hand to silence her. “A first-year could tell me all this. Will someone please explain something that’s not obscenely obvious?” He cast about, eyes finally fixing on Valyn. “How about His Most Radiant Highness?”

Valyn hated the title. It wasn’t even accurate, for one thing—despite the fact that his father was Emperor, he was never going to sit the Unhewn Throne—and for another, his high birth was irrelevant. There were no ranks on the Islands, no special perquisites or prerogatives. If anything, Valyn probably worked a little harder than most. Still, he’d learned long ago that complaining just landed you deeper in the shit, and he did not, at the moment, need to spend more time in the shit, so he took a deep breath and began.

“The crew barely even knew they were in trouble—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Fane cut him off with a snort and a curt chop of his hand.

“I give you ten minutes to look over this ’Kent-kissing goat f*ck, and your only conclusion is that it was a surprise attack? What have you been doing? Pilfering rings and going through pockets?”

“I was just starting—”

“And now you’re finished. How about you, Yurl?” Fane asked, pointing to the tall blond youth. “Maybe you can find some way to contribute to His Most Radiant Highness’s exhaustive analysis.”

“There’s just so much to say,” Sami Yurl began, shooting Valyn a satisfied smirk.

“That spit-licking son of a whore,” Lin hissed, low enough that only Valyn could hear.

Though all the cadets endured the same privations and aimed at the same goal, there were rifts in the group. Most of the young soldiers enlisted out of a hybrid desire to defend the empire, see the world, and fly those enormous birds to which only the Kettral had access. For a peasant’s son from the plains of Sia, the Kettral offered opportunities too fantastic to be believed. Others, however, came to the Islands for other reasons: the chance to fight, to inflict pain, to take life—these drew some as rotting flesh drew vultures. Despite Sami Yurl’s smooth good looks, he was a brutal and nasty fighter. Unlike most of the other cadets, he seemed never to have put his past behind him, striding around the Islands as though expecting everyone to bow and scrape. It was tempting to dismiss him as the pampered, puffed-up son of a lord, an aristocratic fool who had lucked into the cadets through coin or family connections. The truth was more galling: Yurl was an effective, dangerous fighter, better with his blades than some full-rank Kettral. He’d beaten Valyn bloody dozens of times over the years, and if there was one thing he enjoyed more than winning, it was humiliating those he had defeated.

“The attack,” Yurl continued, “happened three days ago, judging by the air temperature, the number of flies, and the rot on the bodies. As Lin said”—he shot her a sly glance—“it was a night assault; otherwise, more of the crew would have been armed. When the pirates hit—”

“Pirates?” the trainer asked sharply.

Yurl shrugged and turned to the nearest corpse, casually kicking the head aside to reveal a gash running from clavicle to chest. “Wounds are consistent with the weaponry that kind of trash tends to favor. The hold is ransacked. They hit the boat and took the goods. Bang the whore and get out the door—pretty standard.”