Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(88)

“Valyn,” she said, nodding curtly. Her eyes, blue as arctic ice, never left his face.

He tensed. Normally he’d have the advantage in close-quarters combat, but even sitting up took a major effort; he wasn’t going to be wrestling her to the ground, not in his condition. He thought about calling for Ren, but the medic was over in the mess hall taking his dinner and filling yet another bowl of stew for Valyn. It would have to be the belt knife, then.

The knife lay beside the remains of an apple on the wooden table beside the bed. He figured the odds at about half that he could reach it and throw before Annick fished an arrow out of her quiver, and he counted himself lucky at that. It seemed like a long time since he’d had a chance at a fair fight.

“What do you want?” he asked, shifting slowly toward the table, freeing his right hand from the blankets in the process.

“I didn’t try to kill you,” she said simply.

Valyn barked a laugh that sent a stab of pain through his chest. “You’re here to apologize?”

Annick tilted her head to one side, considering the question. “No,” she responded after a moment. “I’m here to tell you I didn’t try to kill you.”

Valyn went for the knife. He was slower than he’d expected, slower than he hoped, but the ’Kent-kissing thing was only a few feet away. If he could just … Before he’d even extended his arm, Annick nocked, drew, and released. The blade went skittering away across the floor, while an arrow sprouted in its place, still quivering from the impact. Valyn watched it go still, then let his hand fall. That was it, then. The sniper had him pinned down and there wasn’t a thing he could do.

She considered him calmly, another arrow already nocked to her string. It seemed like a poor way to die—murdered in an infirmary cot—but then, he supposed all the ways looked pretty poor to the person doing the dying.

“So you’re part of it,” he said wearily. It was a vague relief to put a face to the conspiracy at last, even if it wasn’t the face he’d expected.

Annick paused before responding. “Part of what?”

“Whatever the f*ck it is,” he said, gesturing weakly with a hand. “My father. Me. Kaden.” He closed his eyes at the thought of his brother, unwarned, unprepared, going about the strange, simple life that had been decreed for him right up until the moment someone put a blade in his back. It wouldn’t be hard, all the way out there at the end of the empire.

Annick tapped at her bowstring with a finger. “You’re not making sense. Has the medic given you something to dull the pain?”

Valyn started to respond, then checked himself. Maybe she was playing games, taunting him during his final moments. On the other hand, Annick didn’t play games. She seemed to have only two goals—training or killing—and if she really wanted to kill him, she would have shot his neck a moment earlier, not his knife.

“Why did you come here?” he asked guardedly, a sick hope blooming inside him.

“To tell you I didn’t try to kill you,” she said for the third time, eyes hard as chips of glass. “If I wanted to kill you, there are better ways than the middle of the day in the middle of a contest.”

“Well, it’s a ’Kent-kissing good thing that you weren’t shooting this well yesterday,” Valyn said, gesturing to the arrow lodged in the table. “You would have put that chisel point right through the back of my head rather than my shoulder.”

Annick narrowed her eyes. Were it not for the insanity of the notion, Valyn would have thought he’d insulted her professional pride. “The tips were wrong,” she said finally. “They threw off the shots.”

Valyn considered that. “You mean you thought you were firing stunners rather than chisel points.” It made an unexpected sort of sense. The difference in the weight and shape of an arrowhead could account for the missed shots, especially over that sort of range.

“I mean,” Annick corrected him, “the heads are wrong.” She jerked her chin toward the one sticking from the side table. “That’s what they ripped out of you. I found it in the other room when I came in. It’s the other reason I came.”

Valyn stared, first at her, then at the arrow. The brown stain on the shaft was blood, he realized, his blood. Awkwardly, he fumbled it free from the grain of the tabletop.

“It’s a standard chisel point,” he said, holding it up for her to see.

“Exactly,” Annick responded, refusing to elaborate.