Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(133)

Pyrre continued to smile as she had throughout most of the evening, an easy, casual grin that invited camaraderie and confidence. As she nodded, however, Kaden felt a pricking under his skin. “The books say Sanlitun means ‘stone’ in the old tongue. If so, the name suits the Emperor. It will take a hurricane to dislodge him.”

The words should have been comforting. It will take a hurricane to dislodge him. They should have been comforting, but the woman was lying, Kaden was sure of it. At the very least, she was concealing something. He reached for the calm he had summoned at the start of the meal, tried desperately to empty his mind and fill it with the image of the merchant smiling and nodding. The saama’an eluded him. He could think only of his father grasping his small forearm. I will teach you to make the cold, hard decisions through which a boy becomes a man.…

The conversation dragged on, but Kaden moved away from his post, allowing Pater the full space. As the boy peered in fascination into the room below, Kaden leaned back against the rough stone wall of the dovecote. Any fool can see what’s there. You need to see what is not there. As he stared into the darkness, he tried to imagine what Pyrre wasn’t saying about the empire, what she wasn’t saying about his father.





31





“I want to know your well,” Valyn began, trying to keep his voice reasonable and firm at the same time.

It had been over a week since the disaster in the swamp, and he’d made next to no progress in pulling together his Wing. Gwenna was still insubordinate, Laith was still reckless, Annick was still … Annick, and Talal still refused to share the secret source of what little arcane power he possessed. Worse, Valyn continued to harbor doubts about the sniper and the leach; they both had secrets, and he was learning quickly not to trust anyone with secrets. It was impossible to tackle everything at once, but learning Talal’s well would help him in his command of the Wing and might just fit one more piece into the larger puzzle of Amie’s and Lin’s deaths.

Talal nodded guardedly. “I wondered when we would get to this.”

The two of them sat face-to-face across a scarred wooden table. They had their own barrack now, a narrow wooden building with bunks in the back, a large room devoted to weapons and gear on the side, and out front, the “ready room”—a small space with a cast-iron stove, five chairs, and a large wooden table around which the whole Wing could gather to sort equipment, study maps, or plan for the next mission. It wasn’t glamorous, but after the cavernous cadets’ barracks, it felt private and secure. Would feel even better, Valyn thought bleakly, if I shared it with anyone I trusted.

The other three members of his Wing were off at the mess hall, but Valyn had asked Talal to stay behind.

“I’m the commander of this Wing,” he began, careful to douse the heat in his voice. “I choose strategy and tactics based on our assets and liabilities. I’ve respected your privacy so far, but it’s killing us out there.”

For the first couple of days, he’d hoped he would be able to ferret out the leach’s well with a little well-timed observation. It seemed like a straightforward problem: Look around whenever Talal used a kenning, make a list of possible wells, then narrow that list at every future kenning until there was only one possibility left. The problem was, Talal didn’t rely on his strange powers as much as Valyn had expected. Unlike a lot of leaches, he was more than proficient with a blade, better than anyone on the Wing except Valyn, in fact, and he seemed to prefer conventional tactics to more exotic solutions. Worse, even when he did use a kenning, there were just too many possible wells to narrow it down. Valyn might rule out firespike and blood one day, but that still left a legion of possibilities: sea, salt, stone, light, shade, iron … A clerk with a ledger and a year of study might manage it, but not Valyn, not while he was trying to keep his Wing from falling apart.

“If you want me to keep the secret from the rest of the group,” Valyn urged, “I can do that.”

Talal shook his head almost reluctantly. “I can tell you before the mission whether I’ll have access to my well or not, can probably even tell you how strong it will be.”

“Not good enough,” Valyn snapped. “I need backup plans, contingencies. I need all the knowledge we’ve got in order to improvise on the fly.” And I need to know if you took down Manker’s, he thought grimly. I need to know if you killed Amie and Ha Lin. There was still nothing linking the destruction of the alehouse with the deaths of the two women, nothing but the timing of Amie’s murder, but Valyn hadn’t abandoned the suspicion that it was all part of a larger, more intricate plot.