Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(96)

“The details of the Trial,” Shaleel continued, “are reserved for those who successfully navigate this first week, but I can tell you one thing: It will break some of you, break you horribly, and for life.” She paused to let her words sink in. “After eight years, no one doubts your valor. Step forward now and your labors are over. Arin awaits, just a day’s sail distant.”

Arin. The island of failures. The Eyrie had no intention of allowing Kettral-trained soldiers to return to the world to find work as mercenaries or spies, and so those unable or unwilling to complete Hull’s Trial were relocated to Arin, near the northwest end of the Qirin chain. It was the most luxurious of the Islands, more temperate and lush than the others, rising from the sea in a riot of green and blue. The empire took good care of those men and women who bowed out of the Trial, providing them with fine houses and food in perpetuity, all compliments of the good, taxpaying citizens of Annur. It was a life of leisure, a life that tens of thousands of people the continents over would have killed for, and yet, the failed soldiers paid for it with their freedom. They lived on Arin, in that tropical paradise, until they died.

No one stepped forward.

Shaleel nodded as if she had expected as much. “The offer stands,” she said. “Remember that in the days ahead. Remember it as you labor in the surf, as you struggle through the sands, as you come near to drowning in the open sea. Remember, too, that this coming week is the easy part, a gentle prelude. At any point, right through the end, you can step away from all this, you can decide that the life of the Kettral is not a life you want to live.”

The cadets stood still as stones, unwilling to risk one another’s eyes.

“All right,” Shaleel said, shaking her head as though in resignation. “The prelude to the Trial begins.” She turned to her left. “Fane. Sigrid. They’re yours for the next week.”

Adaman Fane stepped to the fore. “One thing you maggots ought to realize,” he began, a vicious smile stretching across his face, “is that I don’t think a man’s ready to be Kettral until he’s puked up his own blood.”

“What about a woman?” Gwenna shot back.

Fane grinned. “Well, you women have the higher pain tolerance, so we need to go even harder on you.”

*

The next six days passed in a fog of agony and exhaustion. Along with the rest of the cadets, Valyn ran until the promised blood wept from blisters and open wounds, swam until he thought he would sink to the bottom of the sound, then dragged his aching body out of the water to run some more. He crawled on his belly for miles over firespike and broken rock, carried an entire tree trunk across the island, then carried it back, wrestled Talal until both of them collapsed into the dirt of the ring, panting for a few hopeless breaths before a boot kicked him in the ribs and a voice told him to run some more. He navigated the coastline in a leaking smallboat with a plank of wood for a paddle. Then they took the plank away and told him to do it again; for half the night he clawed at the surf with his hands, trying to drag the tiny vessel forward.

Each day around noon the cooks slopped a few dozen dead rats, still slick and glistening from the drowning pots, onto the ground outside the ring. That was the only food. Valyn tried to force the meat down, ripping out the liver and heart, cracking the slender bones for the marrow while blood and viscera coated his already filthy fingers. The first day, he vomited it all back up. He cursed himself all night as his gut gnawed at itself angrily, impotently. The next day, he ate everything, even the eyes and soft putty of the brain, and he kept it down.

Like ghosts or apparitions, the trainers were everywhere, looming above the groveling cadets, alternately ridiculing their efforts and extending the soft, treacherous hand of relief.

“You don’t have to do this,” the Flea murmured to Valyn at some point on the fourth day, leaning over him as he tried to haul a huge barrel of sand up out of the surf. “I’ll tell you, kid—you think this is bad? It only gets worse.”

Valyn growled something cross and incomprehensible, even to himself, and kept pushing the barrel.

“Son of an Emperor,” the man mused. “Lot of options for you. Maybe you don’t even need to go to Arin. We could make an exception. Why don’t you call it a day? We’ll get you cleaned up. Set you up on a fast ship home. No shame in it.”

“Piss. Off,” Valyn snarled, yanking the recalcitrant barrel furiously, freeing it from the wet, sucking sand, then throwing his weight behind it as he struggled up the dunes. The Flea chuckled, but he went away.