Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(99)

“I’m fine.”

“Listen…,” he began, leaning closer, trying to achieve some kind of privacy in the hopeless tangle of bodies and voices.

“Not now, Valyn. I didn’t come over here to be fussed over and mothered. I wanted to tell you to watch yourself in whatever’s coming next. Watch Yurl.”

“I’ll do more than watch him, if I have the chance.” The words came out sounding like bluster, but Valyn meant every one of them. Training was dangerous by its very nature, and the Trial even more so. Accidents could happen, could be made to happen.

Lin stared at him, a smile haunting her lips, then gone. “That cuts both ways,” she hissed. “He’ll be out there looking for you, too, and he’s got a lot fewer scruples.” She lowered her voice and glanced back over her shoulder before continuing. “There’s something I need to tell you. Back on the bluffs, when they beat the living shit out of me, I got in a few shots of my own. If you do come up against Yurl, his left ankle—” She shook her head, suddenly hesitant. “I can’t be sure—he seemed all right this past week—but I think I felt something pull, one of the tendons. You remember when Gent busted his ankle in the arena four years back? No one noticed. He could run and fight, but then in that swamp extract, he twisted it the wrong way and … snap.”

Valyn nodded. Gent had been furious with the injury, refusing for months to give it the requisite rest, insisting to everyone that it was “f*cking fine.”

“Yurl might have some weakness there,” Lin continued, grimacing with uncertainty. “I don’t know. Diminished lateral motion, maybe. Maybe weakness at certain angles … something you could work with, anyway, if you find yourself in a tight spot.”

Valyn considered his friend. As Hendran wrote in his chapter on morale, There’s a big gap between beaten, and broken. Yurl and Balendin had taken something from Ha Lin up on the West Bluffs—her pride, her confidence—but the fight was still there. It would take a lot more to wash away her grit.

“He’s not going to get away with it, Lin,” Valyn said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“No,” she agreed, squeezing his arm, smile widening. “He isn’t.” Then, before he could manage another word, she turned back, and he lost her in the press of bodies.

*

Valyn had never set foot on Irsk; the island was off-limits to cadets. He’d seen it from ships, however, and from the air during flight training, barrel drops, and the like. Unlike the other islands in the chain, all of which could boast some vegetation and fresh running water, Irsk was a grim place, all black limestone cliffs and jagged coast, rising abruptly from the water like a fist of hard stone. It was barely half a mile across, too small to support any life aside from the gulls and terns that nested all over the crags. Valyn had never realized that the island played any role in the Trial, and once he’d stepped out of the smallboat and onto a rocky promontory that served as a natural wharf, he looked around, a nagging splinter of worry gouging at him as he followed the others inland.

A narrow path threaded through the jutting rock, pressing ever higher until it spilled into a rough bowl, maybe thirty paces across, at what Valyn took to be the island’s center. Cliffs rose in a circle around them, steep as the walls of an amphitheater. Above them, the gulls circled, shrieking in anger at having been driven from their nests. Valyn, however, like the rest of the cadets, had eyes only for the stout steel cage in the center of the bowl, its iron footings sunk into the rock itself. Beside it stood an old man, hair thin and gray, body trembling with fatigue or exertion. Or fear. There was plenty for him to be frightened of. The cage, not four feet from where he stood, contained two creatures that Valyn could only describe as monsters.

“These are slarn,” Daveen Shaleel began, stepping forward once everyone had assembled and gesturing to the beasts inside the cage. “Both maidens. About six years old and a third their mature weight.”

Valyn stared. So did everyone else.

Referring to the creatures as maidens seemed like some sort of grotesque joke. They looked more like nightmares, five feet of sinuous, reptilian flesh and scale ending in a mouth filled with razor teeth. Their skin glistened the sickening, translucent white of shattered eggs or rotted fish bellies, a web of blue and purple veins snaking beneath the surface. He was reminded of the flayed corpses he had studied on the Islands years before, only these creatures were very much alive, prowling around the small cage on short, powerful legs tipped with savage-looking claws.