Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(122)

“Could be worse,” Laith said. “At least Zee’s a vet. He’s been out there. He’s been tested. Valyn here’s going to get four cadets, and he’s green as the summer grass. You want to talk about a shitty draw—”

“I’m sitting right here, *,” Valyn snapped. He felt both the excitement and the anxiety of his friends, but both were tempered by the angry ache lodged inside his chest. Lin should have been with them, swapping jests and gibes, her dark eyes bright as she waited for her assignment. Not long ago, he’d thought the chances were good that she might even end up on his Wing. It would be logical—

He cut the thought short. She was gone. Someone sitting in the arena had killed her, someone who had just been raised to the rank of full Kettral, someone who might end up assigned to his own Wing.

Laith, sensing the shift in mood, put a hand on Valyn’s shoulder. “You can’t have her back, Val,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically sober. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t go on. We’re all going to die at some point—at least she went quickly, still young and strong.”

Valyn shook his head. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t alone in his sorrow. Laith and Gent, half the ’Kent-kissing class, had liked and admired Lin. He didn’t have a monopoly on his mourning. On the other hand, half the class hadn’t kissed her just before the Trial. Half the class hadn’t let her be beaten blue and bloody on the West Bluffs. Half the class didn’t know that she’d been murdered down in the Hole. He carried that knowledge alone. He wasn’t sure he would have felt any better if she had died honestly in the normal rigors of the test, but at least he wouldn’t be nagged by guilt, by the crushing burden of knowledge. Laith and Gent had said their good-byes, shed their tears, and let Lin go. Valyn couldn’t stop hashing and rehashing events, eyeing with suspicion everyone who crossed his path, plotting an inchoate revenge.

He scanned the faces. Yurl and Balendin were there, a dozen paces away, the leach’s wolfhounds slavering in the morning heat. At some point, this week or this year, Valyn planned to hurt them, hurt them badly, for what they had done to Ha Lin up on the West Bluffs, regardless of whether they were involved in her death down in the Hole. It was the others he needed to worry about now, the ones he hadn’t figured out. He shifted his gaze to Annick.

She sat on the far end of the benches, her bow across her slender knees. At this distance, without being able to see her eyes, he thought she looked almost like a child, lost and alone. Where most of the cadets had gathered in small knots, Annick held herself apart—no one had come within a few paces of her, although some of the veterans seemed to be considering the sniper from beneath hooded eyes. She was a good prospect to step up to one of the established Wings—she was as deadly as any soldier twice her age with that bow, and she certainly had no connections among her peers.

In retrospect, the fact that Annick had come out of the Hole alive was something of a mystery. Underground, in the dark, that bow of hers didn’t count for much. Given the winding of the tunnels, it would take a miracle to even draw the thing before the slarn could attack. This would have been a problem for all the snipers, but most were more proficient with their blades. Valyn narrowed his eyes, but there was nothing to see—just a girl, her hair cut short, eyes fixed on the weapon in her hands.

He turned to look at Talal. The leach, too, sat a little apart, although he looked comfortable with his isolation. A slarn had raked its claws across his face, and while the wounds weren’t immediately obvious on his dark skin, one of those claws had missed his eye by the barest whisker. Valyn eyed the bracelets racked on his wrists—bronze, steel, iron, jade—the hoops and stones, precious and ordinary, sunk in his ears. A leach could draw his power from any of those things, or none.

“I wonder what his well is,” Valyn said, half to himself.

Laith raised an eyebrow. “You want to play that guessing game? Have fun. I’m sure the last eight years have narrowed it down to about a thousand possibilities … provided you were paying attention and taking notes.”

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Gent chimed in.

“What?” Laith responded, grinning. “The fact that we got two blades and a torch when we went down in the Hole while Talal brought the ability to bend nature to his will?”

Valyn considered his next question carefully. He trusted Laith and Gent as much as anyone else on the Islands, but he wasn’t ready to tip his hand, not yet.