Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(94)

For a while he watched a thin white cloud, light as air and impossibly far away. When it scudded beyond the range of his vision, he looked instead into the wide gray blank of the sky. The empty sky, he thought idly to himself. A heaven of nothingness. Without that space, the cloud could not sail past. Without it, the stars could not turn in their orbits. Without that great emptiness, the trees would wither, the light dim, while the men and beasts walking and crawling over the earth, moving effortlessly through the great void of the heavens, suffocated under an unfathomable weight, just as he, now, was slowly suffocating. Kaden stared into the sky until he felt he might fall upward, plummeting away from the earth into the bottomless gray, dwindling to a thin point, then to nothing.

Two days later, Tan broke him from his daze. Kaden hadn’t seen his umial since the penance began, and he raised his eyes in perplexity, trying to make some sense of the robed figure above him.

“How do you feel?” the monk asked after a long silence, squatting down to scoop away the dirt covering Kaden’s mouth.

Kaden considered the question, revolving it in his mind like a strange, smooth stone. Feel. He knew what the word meant, but had forgotten how to connect it to himself. “I don’t know,” he replied.

“Are you angry?”

Kaden moved his head slightly in the negative. It occurred to him that he had reason to be angry, but his imprisonment was a fact. The earth around him was a fact. Thirst was a fact. It made no sense to be angry at facts.

“I could leave you here until the new moon.”

The new moon. Kaden had watched the moon each night, watched as the passage of time pared away sliver after lucent sliver. It was gibbous now, just fuller than half. The new moon was still a week off. Days earlier, the thought would have filled him with dread, but he could no longer muster the strength for dread. He could not even muster the strength to respond.

“Are you ready for me to dig you out?” Tan pressed.

Kaden stared at the man, at the puckered scars running down the sides of his scalp. Where did he get those scars? he wondered idly. Everything about the monk was a mystery. There was no point trying to guess the right answer to the question. Tan would release him or he would not, according to whatever arcane thoughts goverened his mood.

“I don’t know,” Kaden replied, his voice raw and ragged in his throat.

The older monk considered him for a while longer, then nodded.

“Good,” he said, then gestured to Akiil. “Dig,” he added, gesturing to the earth around Kaden.

The sensation was strange and unsettling at first. As the pressing weight that had held him, had crushed him, for so many days began to disappear, he felt as though he were falling, endlessly falling. As the gravel crunched beneath the steel, Kaden felt something trickle back into him: thoughts, he realized. Emotions.

“You’re letting me out?”

“It would have been better to leave you in another week,” Tan replied, “but circumstances have changed.”

Kaden squinted, trying to make sense of the words. “Circumstances?” The earth was packed around him. The sky spread above him. The sun carved its ineluctable arc through the blue. Those were the circumstances. What could have changed?

A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting the monk’s face into deep shadow.

“I’d leave you here longer, but it’s no longer safe.”





22





The morning of the start of Hull’s Trial dawned clear and cool. Valyn was relieved when the watery light finally leaked over the horizon. He had tossed and turned half the night, alternating between the worry about Ha Lin that had plagued him for the past week, and the more nebulous fear of the grueling test that lay ahead, the test that would determine the course of his life. It was all well and good to be selected as a child by the Kettral, all well and good to spend half a life training on the Islands. If you failed Hull’s Trial, it was all finished, the years of work gone like yesterday’s breeze.

Just get through the week, he kept telling himself. You can’t help anyone—not Lin, not Kaden, no one—if you don’t make it through the week.

The day was chilly for the Qirins, and as the cadets assembled on the rocky headland beneath the wide tenebral oak, a menacing black front was moving in swiftly from the north, darkening the waves beneath it and whipping their crests to a foamy chop. The storm, if it broke, would make for a dismal start to the Trial, not that the Eyrie commanders would take any more notice of the storm than they did of the inevitable injuries to come. When you signed on to be Kettral, you knew what you were getting into: sometimes it rained; sometimes people got hurt. You bandaged your wounds, buckled your slicks, and got on with it.