Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(91)

“I can help,” he said stubbornly.

“Fuck. That. I’m a soldier, same as you. Same as Sami Yurl.” She had worried off another scab as she talked and stared down at it, trembling. One by one, she flexed her fingers, watching the blood well up. “I got careless is all,” she said finally. “It won’t happen again.”

Valyn felt a cold stone settle in his gut. His shoulder throbbed, but he didn’t care a shit for his shoulder.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “Whatever you need. You just tell me.”

“I don’t … I thought I needed to talk to you. I thought it would help.” She flicked the blood from her fingers. “Stupid of me. How could it help? The thing’s all over, all done. You might be an Emperor’s son, but you can’t stuff the sand back in the hourglass.” She turned her head and met his eyes at last. “There’s no going back—just forward. What I need is some time.”

“No,” he replied reflexively. “Lin…”

He reached out toward her one more time, but she slipped past his grip.

“I need to be alone for a while, Valyn. For now, that’s what you can do. Stop thinking you have to protect me because we kissed once in the mess hall. I don’t belong to those bastards, and I certainly don’t belong to you.”





21





One could be forgiven, Kaden thought, for believing that Tan might go easier on him now that the whole mystery of the kenta had been revealed. After all, the older monks had finally taken him into their confidence, had explained to him secrets to which only a few people in the empire, only a few people in the whole world were privy. One could be forgiven for thinking that the conversation in the abbot’s study constituted a graduation of sorts, an acknowledgment that he had moved from being an acolyte to … something more. One could be forgiven, he thought unsmilingly, but one would be wrong.

As they departed from the small stone hut, Tan turned, blocking the narrow path. Kaden was tall, but the older monk overtopped him by half a head, and it took an effort of will not to retreat a step.

“The vaniate is not something you can learn like mathematics or the names of trees,” he began, voice barely more than a growl. “You cannot study it. You cannot commit it to memory. You cannot pray that a god will deliver the wisdom to you in your sleep.”

Kaden nodded, uncertain where the conversation was leading.

His umial smiled bleakly. “You are quick to agree. You fail to understand that the emptiness does not simply grow inside you like a plant. Think of the hollow of the bowls you just completed. You had to drive your fingers into the clay. You had to force the hollowness upon it.”

“It feels more like guiding than forcing,” Kaden ventured, made bold by the abbot’s confidence and his newfound knowledge. “If you push too hard, the bowl is ruined.”

Tan regarded him for a long, uncomfortable moment, his stare pointed as a nail. “If you learn one thing under my tutelage,” the older monk said slowly, “it will be this: Emptiness exists only when something else has been gouged away.”

And so it was that Kaden found himself on a bare patch of ground sandwiched between the rear wall of the refectory and a low band of cliff, shovel in one hand, a half-dug hole in front of him. A few feet away Tan sat cross-legged in the shade of a juniper. His eyes were closed, his breathing steady, as though he slept, but Kaden knew better. He wouldn’t have bet money that his umial ever really slept.

The monk had instructed him to dig a hole straight down, two feet wide and as deep as Kaden was tall. The scent of stewed onions and hearty brown bread hung on the breeze, and through the refectory windows Kaden could hear the murmured conversation of the other monks, the scraping of benches, the clink of wood on clay as they filled their bowls. His stomach grumbled, but he forced hunger from his mind and turned his attention to the task once more. Whatever was in store, it would only go worse if Tan thought his pupil was shying away from the work.

The ground was hard and rocky, desiccated as stale bread, more gravel than earth. Time and again Kaden had to lower himself into the hole to claw at a large stone with his bare hands, scraping away at the outline until he could drive a couple of fingers beneath and pry the thing from its socket. The going was slow. He ripped two fingernails out of their beds, and his hands were cut and bleeding, but by the evening bell Kaden had hacked a hole out of the earth to roughly the right dimensions.