Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(110)

“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 f*cking 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.