Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(112)

“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.

The rigors of the Trial had done nothing to smooth the smugness from Yurl’s handsome face, but his smile soured when he found Valyn staring back at him. He tried to hold the gaze, then cursed under his breath and turned away. My eyes, Valyn realized. He’d seen them that morning in a mirror, but had been too wrung out to feel anything about the change. They had been brown; now they were black. It was a simple fact. Others, however, seemed to find them unsettling. He filed the observation away as something that could be useful at some point.

“Before we light the pyre,” Shaleel said, “those of you who wish may approach the body.”

Valyn waited for the line to form, then took his place at the end. Some of the soldiers took only a moment, touching Lin’s hand or saying a few words, prayers or farewells that he couldn’t hear. When Sami Yurl reached the bier, he grinned, then chucked Lin under the chin playfully. Valyn slowly unclenched his hand. Lin was dead. Yurl couldn’t hurt her any longer. His time would come soon enough.

Gwenna pressed something into Lin’s hands, Laith whispered a few phrases in her ear, a sad smile on his face, and Gent tucked his favorite knife into her belt. When Balendin stepped forward, wolfhounds at his heels, he just looked for a long time, silent as Lin herself, then turned away.

Valyn found himself before the bier. He glanced over his shoulder, as though someone watching might tell him what to say, but the assembled faces were cool and quiet, ghostlike above their black uniforms. He turned back to the body. The wounds that had killed his friend—a half dozen slashes across her stomach and chest—were covered now by a clean, black tunic. After he first carried her out of the cave, Valyn had run his finger’s over those gashes, trying to understand how a life could have seeped away through a few slices. They were ugly, nasty rents, but surely they couldn’t have killed her. Surely you had to rip a larger hole in the body, had to spill out more of the guts, had to crush more of the bone, in order to drive the life out of it.

He shook his head. Evidently not. Lin’s face was sallow and waxen. Dead a day and a half, he thought, then cursed himself for the clinical calculation. This wasn’t an exercise, wasn’t a cadet’s battlefield drill. It was supposed to be a chance at a final farewell, but there were no such chances. He should have said his farewells days ago, should have been saying them every day of every year. It struck him, as he looked down at the cold corpse, at his own body beside it, that the Kettral wore blacks, not to blend with the darkness, but to be ready, always, for the funeral.

There seemed little point in speaking, but he took her hand gently, closing his eyes as he held it between his own. This was the time to offer a prayer, but what god would he pray to? Hull, whose trial she had died trying to complete? Ananshael, who had killed her? Maybe Meshkent was most appropriate, but then, the Lord of Pain had already released her from his claws. Valyn opened his eyes, tracing the fingers one by one, the back of the knuckles, the wrist.…

He paused. Whoever had cleaned her up had done a good job—the blood had been scrubbed away, the wounds sutured with fine thread. On her wrist, however, just beneath the protruding bone, ran an angry red line of abrasions. He stared. Among all her other, more serious wounds, it would be easy to miss, the most insignificant scratch, but now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t pull his eyes away: a faint line of herringbone impressions dug into the flesh, the kind of impression left by Liran cord, the kind of impression that had marred Amie’s wrists when they cut her down from the rafter weeks before.