Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(113)

His breath stuck in his throat. Somewhere out over the harbor a gull cawed. He could hear the waves sucking at the sand, lisping the same malevolent syllable over and over. His eyes flicked back to her wrist, back to the faint abrasion, trying to make sense of it. He wanted to lean over, to look closer, but he was surrounded, all eyes upon him. How long had he been standing there, holding her hand? He had no idea. How much longer could he stay without raising eyebrows, raising suspicions? As subtly as he could, he pulled back the sleeve of her tunic. He had assumed her wounds came from the slarn, and in his grief he had not thought to examine them. Now, however, as he studied one of the rents in her flesh, he could see that the edges were clean, not jagged. His heart went cold inside him. Something that might have been fear or rage squirmed beneath his skin. Steel had parted Ha Lin’s flesh, good steel. She may have fought the slarn in the darkness, but one of the newly minted Kettral had killed her.

And it wasn’t easy for them, a part of him noted with grim satisfaction. Given the number and arrangement of wounds, it was clear that Lin had fought back, fought hard.

“You were a warrior,” he murmured so quietly no one else could hear. The words sounded both right and meager.

With elaborate care, he returned her hand to her chest. Lin hadn’t just died. Somewhere in the cave, somewhere so far beneath the earth the entire deed was blotted by darkness, someone had battled her to a standstill, then bound her wrists. The same person who had tortured Amie in the tiny garret and left her body hanging for the flies had got to Lin as well, had murdered her, a quarter mile from the end of the Trial.

He forced himself to turn, to walk a few steps from the pyre, and resume his place among the other soldiers. One of you, he thought, eyeing the faces. It was one of you. His eyes flickered to Annick. He hadn’t spoken to her since the infirmary, but he hadn’t forgotten the look of rage and death that flashed across her face when he asked about Amie. If she had been involved in the girl’s death, then she was implicated in Ha Lin’s as well.

The blaze caught quickly, the age-old scent of burning wood mingling with the sickening smell of charred flesh as the tongues of flame licked hungrily upward, gnawing through bier and body both. Valyn stared into the shifting flame and shadow, stared at the ruddy sparks, stared at the sudden gout of brilliant yellow flame that exploded from Lin’s hand—the special starshatter that Gwenna had tucked there in her own bizarre tribute. He stared until his eyes watered with the smoke, until they burned, but he refused to close them or to back away from the flame.





27





“Dead,” Kaden said flatly, trying to make sense of the word.

“Slaughtered,” Akiil amended, forcing a hand through his dark hair. “Just like the goats.”

Kaden turned the idea over in his mind. Serkhan Khandashi had mostly kept to himself, spending his days on the trails beyond the monastery, studying trees. He always claimed he was preparing to write a treatise on the flora of eastern Vash, but no one had ever seen him set brush to parchment. Kaden hadn’t known the man well, but the thought that he could just cease, could go from a curious, quiet observer of the world to a scattered heap of decaying meat, made him faintly queasy.

“I thought the monks guarding the goats were in groups,” he said, putting down his spoon on the rough table. The bowl of turnip soup in front of him no longer seemed so appetizing, and the large refectory hall, normally so welcoming, struck him as cold and austere. A chill spring wind sliced through the open windows, rustling the sleeves of his robe, tugging at the meager fire that flickered on the hearth, stealing away any warmth it might have offered.

“They were in groups,” Akiil responded.

“Then what happened?”

“No one knows. The monks were all hidden, remember? When it came time to switch shifts, Allen found what was left of Serkhan scattered over half the eastern slope.”

“And the other monks didn’t hear anything?”

Akiil squinted at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You know the spring wind in the mountains. Half the time, you can’t hear your own footsteps.”

Kaden nodded, staring dully out one of the low, small windows. The sun was falling down toward the west, and already Pta’s gems, the brightest stars in the northern sky, were visible, hanging in a glimmering necklace above the peaks. He pulled his robe tighter around him to guard against the gusts that blew through the chinks in the casement.

It had been more than a week since Tan had Akiil dig him out of the hole, and although his appetite had started to return, painful sores covered his elbows and hips, and it was still difficult to hobble from the refectory to the meditation hall to his bed and back. Worse, his mind felt … blinded somehow, as though he had looked too long at a bright light. He still wasn’t sure what had happened to him inside that hole—the final days, in particular, seemed like a dream, or a story read from some musty tome—but he was glad to be free. He had a feeling that if Tan had left him buried much longer, his mind might have drifted away like one of those clouds. That, he suspected uneasily, might have been the point.