Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(215)

“Sit down,” Kaden said, gesturing to the rock. “You’ve been flying all day.”

“For all the ’Kent-kissing good it did us,” Valyn replied. Still, after a moment, he lowered himself to the ledge with a groan.

“I feel like someone’s been beating me with the blunt edge of a board for the past week,” he said, twisting his head, stretching the muscles of his neck. He balled his hands into fists, cracked the knuckles, then frowned at the palms as though he’d never seen them before. “Every part of my body hurts.”

Kaden smiled wearily. “I thought you Kettral lived for this sort of thing. Martial valor, godlike endurance, the daily cheating of Ananshael—”

“Nah,” Valyn replied, plucking at his torn, sweat-stained blacks. “I mostly got into it for the clothes.”

“You should have been a monk. It’s hard to beat a wool robe.”

Valyn chuckled, and the two stared out over the mountains and valleys, side by side, companions in the simplicity of silence. Kaden would have remained there all day if he could, all year, enjoying the low rush of water, the sound of the wind knifing between the passes, the sun warm on his cool skin. He knew these things, understood them in a way he had ceased to understand his own brother, ceased to understand himself.

“So,” Valyn said after a long while, “what do I call you now?”

Kaden kept his eyes on the far mountains as he revolved the question. During the long flight from the monastery, he hadn’t had a chance to grieve for his father or consider his new station in life. After eight years with the Shin, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to grieve anymore. The fact that he was Emperor of Annur, sole sovereign over two continents, leader of millions, felt like just that, a fact; the truth had not penetrated to any organ that could actually feel it. A part of him wanted to make a joke, to laugh it off with a wry remark, but the impulse felt wrong, somehow, unfair to the monks who had died, to Valyn’s Wing, who had flown all this way to rescue him, to his father, who also had spent long years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains and now lay cold in his tomb.

“I suppose it’s ‘Your Radiance’ now,” Valyn continued, shaking his head. “That’s the protocol, right?”

Kaden stared at the blazing orb of the lowering sun. He wondered if his eyes looked like that.

“It is,” he replied finally. Then he turned to Valyn. “But when we’re not around others … When there’s just the two of us … I mean someone’s got to use my name, right?”

Valyn shrugged. “It’s up to you. Your Radiance.”

Kaden closed his eyes against the honorific, then forced himself to open them once more. “What happened with the other Wing leader?” he asked. “With Yurl?”

He’d seen the body—a carcass, really—gutted, the hands hacked away, eyes bulging with an expression that could only have been terror. It was a savage killing, purposeless in its violence.

Valyn grimaced, met his eyes, looked away, and for a moment Kaden caught a glimpse of the child he had known a decade earlier—uncertain but unwilling to show it, trying to put a bold face on his confusion.

“There was a girl, Ha Lin…,” he began, then trailed off, fingering a nasty scab on the back of his hand, ripping it free in a wash of blood without even glancing down. When he looked back at Kaden, his eyes were hooded again, unreadable. He looked like a soldier. More than a soldier, Kaden thought, a killer.

“All I could think was, Not again. I wasn’t going to let him hurt anyone else. Never again.” He clenched his fists, and blood flowed from the wound, puddling on the stone.

“But his hands…,” Kaden said, slowly. “Was it necessary?”

“Fuck necessary,” Valyn replied, voice hard and brittle as steel too long hammered.

Kaden considered his brother for a long time, trying to read the tight cords running beneath his skin, the unconscious grimace, the nicks and scars that marked his face and hands. It was like studying a scroll in some long-forgotten language. Rage, Kaden reminded himself. This is rage, and pain, and confusion. He recognized the emotions, but after so many years among the Shin, he had forgotten how raw they could be.

Finally, he reached out and placed a hand over Valyn’s fist. The monks weren’t much for physical contact, and the sensation was odd, something remembered from a childhood so distant, it might have been a dream. At first Kaden thought his brother would pull away, but after a dozen heartbeats he felt the fist relax.