Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(136)

“Who else knows about this?”

The leach shook his head. “Hard to say. Daveen Shaleel didn’t exactly trumpet the fact. I would imagine that most Wings are like us … maybe a few have realized. Maybe more. It’s possible some never will.”

“But you figured it out.”

Talal’s face went wary once more. “Something about being a leach, I guess. When you’ve worked with a well as long as I have, you … notice things. You notice the little changes.”

Abruptly, Valyn started to laugh. “Well, I’m glad you were able to explain it to me. Left to my own devices, I probably never would have thought beyond the foul taste of that ’Kent-kissing thing.…” The laughter shriveled in his throat. “But the egg I found—”

“—was different,” Talal concluded, nodding.

“I wasn’t supposed to eat that egg. No one in the Eyrie planned on it. No one knows what it does.”

“Well, it didn’t kill you.”

“Yet.”

“I’ll bet my blades it was what changed your eyes.”

Valyn nodded, comprehension and unease washing over him at once. “And there are other things—,” he murmured, breaking off as he remembered who he was talking to.

“—but you don’t want to tell me about them,” Talal finished, his expression unsurprised but sad.

Valyn took a deep breath. He was walking the narrowest of lines: Step too far to one side, and the leach would never lower his guard. Step too far to the other, and he’d give up more information than he gained.

“I can feel things,” he admitted reluctantly.

Talal leaned in closer.

“When I found Ha Lin,” Valyn continued, “I knew something was lying across the floor yards before I reached her.” He closed his eyes and let the memory wash over him, the whispering currents of air eddying over his skin, the faintest scent of her hair in his nostrils. He hadn’t noticed anything like that since leaving the cave, but then, since leaving the cave, he’d been overwhelmed with more ordinary sensations: a new Wing, training runs, arguments with Gwenna. Now, however, with his eyes shut, he let his breathing slow and just … waited.

There was a crack in the wall, he realized, a few feet above his head and to the left; the draft lifted the hairs along the back of his neck. He could hear the wick fizzling in the lamp. He could … he squeezed his eyes shut tighter … he wasn’t sure if he was seeing or feeling, but he knew right where Talal was sitting, even something about his posture.

The leach remained silent, still.

“I knew it was her,” Valyn went on, voice quiet, eyes still closed. “I didn’t believe it at the time. I didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. Lin.” He shook his head. “I knew. Even dead, even in the pitch dark, I knew her.”

There were tears in his eyes when he opened them, but he met the leach’s gaze defiantly. She was my friend, he told himself. There is no shame in weeping for her. They were the first tears he had allowed himself since finding her, and for a long time they just streamed down his cheeks, puddling quietly in the table’s ruts. After a while, they stopped. He wiped his cheeks roughly with a palm.

“If you speak a word of this,” he said, his voice ragged, “to anyone on the Wing, I’ll rip out your throat and we’ll make do without a leach.”

“Iron,” Talal replied, voice quiet but sure.

“What the f*ck are you talking about?”

“Iron,” the leach said again, gesturing to the knife at his belt, the rough bracelets around both wrists. “That’s my well. Of course, we don’t carry much iron, but there’s plenty of iron in steel, enough to do the job.”

Valyn put his palms flat on the table, trying to stow his own emotions and make sense of the claim. There was every chance the leach was lying to him, and no way to know for sure. He considered those dark, still eyes.

“Why isn’t it more powerful?”

Talal shrugged. “Not that much iron around most of the time—a few blades, a few arrowheads. Enough to work with, usually, but rarely enough to do anything impressive.”

“If we were going in after a fortified position,” Valyn asked warily, “could you bring it down?”

“Not a chance.”

“What about something that wasn’t built out of stone? Something less sturdy—like a wooden palisade?” Or an alehouse on stilts, he thought to himself. What about Manker’s?