Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(86)

The heat lapped at Adare’s face, and sweat slicked the flesh beneath her robes.

“You dare call us tyrants,” she spat back. “You? Who murdered the rightful Emperor?”

Uinian smiled. “The test will tell.”

He will fail, Adare said, repeating the inner mantra again and again. He will fail. But the man had mocked and manipulated the entire process thus far. That searing heat was not a flame, and the smile had not left his lips.

“I will not accept this,” Adare insisted, raising her voice over the growing noise of the crowd. “I do not accept this trial.”

“You may forget, woman,” Uinian replied, his own voice vicious, scornful, “that you are not the goddess. Your family has ruled for so long that you demand too much.”

“I demand obedience to the law,” Adare raged, but someone was already taking her by the shoulder gently but firmly, drawing her back. She struggled to escape, but she was no match for the hands that held her. In a fit of fury, she rounded on the person. “Release me! I am a Malkeenian princess and the Chief Minister of Finance—”

“—and a fool if you think you can change anything here,” il Tornja murmured, voice low but hard. His grip felt like steel as he held her back. “This is not the time, Adare.”

“There is no other time,” she spat. “It has to be now.” She writhed in the kenarang’s grasp, unable to free herself but turning back toward the priest nonetheless. A thousand eyes fixed on her; people were shouting and yelling, but she ignored them. “I demand your life!” she screamed at Uinian. “I demand your life in return for the life of my father.”

“Your demands mean nothing,” he replied. “You do not rule here.” And then he turned and stepped into the light.

Uinian IV, the Chief Priest of Intarra, the man who had murdered the Emperor and taken her father, did not burn. The very air ran liquid with luminous heat, and yet the priest himself merely spread his arms, raised his face to the radiance as he might to a warm rain, letting it wash over him. For an eternity he stood there, then stepped, finally, from the rays.

Impossible, Adare thought, slackening in il Tornja’s grip. It’s not possible.

“Someone killed Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian,” Uinian declared, triumph writ large across his face, “but it was not I. The Goddess Intarra has declared me unsullied by sin, just as she once declared Anlatun the Pious, while those who thought to bring me low—” He stared pointedly from Ran il Tornja to Adare. “—have been checked, and humbled. I can only pray to the Lady of Light that they remember this humility in the dark days to come.”





20





The morning sun blazed through the window, bright and unyielding. With a grunt, Valyn raised a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare. The entire room was white: white walls, white ceiling, even the wide pine boards of the floor had been scoured, sanded, and scrubbed so many times, they were bleached of all color. The place smelled of the strong alcohol the Kettral used to scrub out wounds and the herbal poultices they plastered on after the cleaning was done. Valyn would have preferred to move his bed into the cool shadow at the side of the room, but Wilton Ren, the medic on duty, had given him strict instructions about staying still and calm, instructions he would have happily ignored save for the lance of pain that drove through his chest every time he so much as shifted.

According to Ren, they’d dragged him in, pulled the arrow, stitched the wound, and bandaged it, all while he was unconscious. When he finally woke, after a day and a night, his first thought had not been for the puncture in his shoulder or the one who fired the arrow, but for Ha Lin. Whatever went wrong on the sniper field, he’d survived it. He had no such assurances about Lin’s meeting with Balendin. Valyn tried to drag himself out of bed half a dozen times, reaching the door before he collapsed on his final effort. That was where Ren found him.

“Look,” the man grumbled, hauling him up and depositing him back in the bunk, “I’m the medic here. People bust an arm, they come to me. Lose an eye, they come to me. Crack their fool heads on a barrel drop—they come to me. If there was something wrong with your friend, I’d have heard about it. Now,” he said, eyeing Valyn appraisingly. “You can stay in that ’Shael-spawned bed on your own, or I can go get a nice length of stout rope and keep you there.” Although Ren was well into his fifth decade and hadn’t been out of the infirmary in half that time, he had a neck like a bull, arms thicker than Valyn’s legs, and a scarred face that suggested he’d be just as happy to beat his patient into unconsciousness as to heal him. Despite the man’s rough delivery, however, his words calmed Valyn. Qarsh was a small island. If Lin was hurt, the news would travel quickly.