Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(167)

“Make money,” Annick replied grimly. “Down at the docks.”

“Whoring.”

“Yes, whoring. That was the last I saw of her.”

“Well,” Laith said after a long pause. “We’ve ruled out one person that didn’t kill her, but that still leaves a few hundred more who might have. Now that we know it wasn’t Annick, we’re not even sure it was a soldier.”

Valyn ground his teeth silently. There was more to the story—the marks on Amie’s wrists, the same impressions on Ha Lin’s corpse. His Wing didn’t know any of that, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to share it. After Lin’s death, he had trusted no one, nursing his suspicions in guarded silence, vowing to work alone until he had ferreted out both Lin’s killers and his father’s. Working alone, keeping his own council, he was unlikely to be betrayed. And just as unlikely to learn anything new. He’d been fighting his private war since Ha Lin’s death. Fighting it, and losing it.

The final chapter of Hendran’s Tactics sprang to mind: Plan all you like, but remember: war is chaos, and at some point every soldier has to throw the dice. The old Wing commander must have had something figured out—he had supposedly died in his bed at the age of eighty-four. Of course, no one was trying to scrub his whole ’Shael-spawned family off the face of the earth. It didn’t matter. If Valyn didn’t solve some of the mysteries confronting him, he would live and die a prisoner on the island where he had trained for life as a soldier, sitting impotently by as some shadowy cabal killed first his brother, then his sister, and then, if they still thought he was important enough to bother with, Valyn himself. His Wing would probably die with him—a thought that had not crossed his mind before. Anyone thorough enough to plan the assassination of the Malkeenian line wouldn’t flinch at a few extra bodies, especially if those bodies might have known things they shouldn’t have. Talal and Annick, Gwenna and Laith, they were all in danger just because Eyrie Command had assigned them to his Wing. They were in mortal danger, and they didn’t even know the facts.

“I think Amie’s murderer was Kettral,” Valyn said at last. “And I think the same person captured Lin in the middle of the Trial—captured her, then killed her.”

For a while they just stared at him, Laith and Gwenna incredulous, Talal confused, Annick unreadable.

“It was the slarn,” Laith said. “You saw her wounds yourself. After you carried her out.”

“Something’s got all twisted here,” Gwenna agreed, “but Ha Lin died an honest death down there, a soldier’s death.”

“The slarn may have landed some of those blows,” Valyn agreed, trying to keep a rein on his anger, “but most of the slashes were made by good steel. Not just that: there were marks on her wrists, impressions from a rope.”

“A rope?” Talal asked. “Like she’d been bound?”

Valyn nodded grimly. “With Liran cord—you know that tight pattern. It’s different from what you find in any other kind of rope.”

“What does it have to do with Amie?” Annick asked, her voice tight.

“Amie was strung up with the same sort of cord. Ha Lin and I found her. We cut her down. It was one of the things that made us think her killer was Kettral.”

The conversation faltered as everyone tried to make sense of the new information, staring into the lantern on the table as though the flicker of the inconstant light held some sort of answer.

“Other people have access to Liran cord,” Laith pointed out after a while.

“Not that many,” Gwenna said. “Your standard dockyard thug isn’t going to waste something like that just to tie up a whore.” As the word left her lips, she seemed to realize her audience. She glanced over at Annick, and a flush rose to her cheeks. “I’m just saying,” she bulled ahead, “that Valyn’s right. It’s strange.”

“About Lin,” Talal pressed, shaking his head in dismay. “Are you sure about the marks? We were all so beat up after the Trial—” He gestured to his arms, his face. “I had dozens of cuts, scrapes, gashes.”

“Not to mention a slarn bite to the arm,” Laith agreed. “It was brutal down there. Lin was good, better than good, but any one of us, with a little bad luck…” He grimaced. “It could have happened, Val. It could have been just the slarn.”

“It could have,” Valyn replied, keeping his voice level, “but it wasn’t. I saw plenty of slarn wounds after the Trial, and I saw the slices on Lin’s body. They were different. I looked at her wrists just before they burned her, both wrists. Maybe it’s just a freak coincidence that Amie had the same marks, but we know one thing for sure: Only cadets went down in the Hole. One of the cadets killed Ha Lin, and I’d wager both my blades against a bucket of piss that whoever killed her killed Amie as well.”