Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(134)

“I’m not sure you realize what you’re asking for,” Talal said quietly.

“Information,” Valyn said, spreading his hands. “That’s all. Just information.”

Talal shook his head once more. “You don’t understand.”

“Enlighten me.”

The leach took a deep breath. “I grew up with the same fear of leaches that anyone felt. My uncle used to come over and frighten us with stories of the Atmani—bloodcurdling stuff. My father once walked three days just to see a leach hanged. He returned home with a smile on his face.” Talal’s eyes went distant as he spoke. “We—my brothers and I—were so angry we hadn’t been allowed to go. We begged for all the details. Did he have a forked tongue? Did he cry blood? Did he piss himself when he died?

“A week later, I had my first delving.” The leach’s eyes were far away, his face blank as he continued. “I was working late in my father’s shop. I’d mismeasured a tenon, ruined a whole evening’s worth of effort. I was cursing the thing, cursing myself, cursing the chair, when suddenly, the chairback shattered. At first I was busy just picking the splinters out of my flesh. Then I realized what had happened. What it meant.

“No one had seen it—if they had, I’d have been hanged or burned or stoned in the street before the sun rose—but I still felt the guilt, the disgust. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t tried to use it. I knew the stories. When you had a well, it came to possess you, to twist you. It unmade everything good inside you until you would stop at nothing to bend the world to your will.”

He paused, gazing at his palm as though searching for something written there, some explanation scrawled in the lines of his flesh. “I found a rope in the barn, tied a careful noose, pulled it tight around my neck, and stepped off the back of the wagon.”

He stopped, and raised his eyes to the bruised sunset beyond the grimy window.

“And?” Valyn asked, drawn in to the story in spite of himself.

Talal shrugged. “My father found me. Cut me down. He never did know why I’d done it. A couple men from the Eyrie came three weeks later.”

“How’d they know?”

“They’ve had time to learn what to look for,” Talal replied. “Unexpected outbursts, children gone missing in safe towns, suicides that don’t make sense.” He fixed Valyn with a level gaze. “I wasn’t unusual. No one wants to learn that they’re an abomination.”

“Your family?” Valyn asked cautiously.

“They think I’m just a soldier. It’s a lie, but it makes them proud.”

A silence hung between them, heavy and grim as lead. Valyn could hear laughter and roughhousing in the next barracks over and faintly, in the distance, the clink of spoons against bowls as the Kettral tucked into their meals over in the mess hall. The room in which he sat, however, was still and nearly dark.

“I’m not your family,” Valyn said finally. “I’ve spent half my life here, on the Islands. I don’t feel … that way about leaches.”

Talal met his eye, then smiled bleakly. “You’re a shitty liar, Valyn. You may make a good Wing leader someday, but you’re a shitty liar.”

Valyn took a deep breath. “It’s hard, knowing that someone else can do things you can’t, things you can’t even begin to understand. I won’t deny that, but we’re on the same Wing now. That should be a bond stronger than blood. We need to start trusting each other.”

Talal considered him soberly. “And when are you going to start trusting me?”

Valyn felt as though he’d been caught wrong-footed in a duel, attacking when he should have been looking to his defense.

“I do,” he protested weakly. “I trust you.”

“No,” the leach replied evenly. “You trust Laith a little, Gwenna less, and Annick and me not at all.”

Valyn leaned back in his chair. He thought he’d hidden his emotions, thought that he’d been distant and professional, the way a Wing commander was supposed to be. “Are you—?”

“Using a kenning?” Talal asked, his mouth quirked in a wry twist. “Looking into your mind?”

It sounded foolish, once the words were said aloud, but Valyn had no way to know what the leach could and could not do.

“No,” Talal said. “I’m watching. Listening. It’s pretty clear you’d rather bury a knife in my gut than work with me.” He shook his head. “I’m not Balendin, you know. He’s a lot stronger than I am. His well, whatever it is, runs incredibly deep, but that’s not the only difference.”