Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(111)

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 f*cking 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, f*cked-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 f*ck 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.