“It was just you two,” Juren grumbled. “You two and that slick, gold-haired bastard. The one that broke the wineglass.”
Valyn considered the claim. Sami Yurl was perfectly capable of plotting, of murder, and he had been in the alehouse. On the other hand, Yurl was no leach. Maybe he was wrapped up in the thing somehow, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d brought down Manker’s all on his own.
“No one in the morning?” Lin pressed. “No other Kettral?”
The thug wrinkled his brow as though fighting through a haze of wine. “Yeah. Yeah, there was someone else—short, crop-haired girl. Wore the same blacks as the rest of you lot. Eyes like nails. She didn’t stay long.”
“Looked about fifteen years old?”
“How’n Hull’s name should I know?” the man snapped. “She barely talked.”
“Annick,” Valyn said, glancing over at Lin.
She grimaced and nodded. Annick Frencha was the best sniper among the cadets, one of the best snipers on the Islands, despite the fact that she had yet to pass Hull’s Trial. The girl was a mystery. She seemed to have no need or desire for human contact, and despite her size, she was every bit as brutal as Yurl or Balendin. Valyn had watched her working with her bow once in the fields to the north of the compound. She had shot a rabbit through the foot at a hundred paces, and the creature was shrieking—a terrified, unearthly sound—as it tried to drag itself to safety. Annick cocked her head to the side before loosing a second arrow. This one transfixed the rabbit’s back leg. Hitting the creature at all at that distance was impressive, but Valyn started to suspect that she was missing its heart on purpose. “Why don’t you kill it?” he’d asked. Annick had looked at him with those icy eyes of hers. “I want a moving target,” she replied, nocking another arrow to the string. “If it’s dead, it doesn’t move.” Valyn had little trouble believing that Annick would destroy a tavern and the people inside it just to accomplish her objective. But then she, like Yurl, was no leach.
“How about a tall guy, ink on the arms, feathers in the hair?” Lin asked.
“Nah,” Juren replied, waving away the suggestion. “Nobody like that.”
“He’s always got a couple of wolfhounds with him,” she added.
“I told you. There wasn’t no one like that there.”
Valyn was about to ask what Annick was doing at Manker’s when the door burst open. He dropped a hand to his belt knife. People who slammed open doors weren’t usually looking for a quiet evening of cards, and he readied himself for some drunken sailor, half-dead on rum and swinging a busted bottle. Instead, a young woman stumbled into the room. She wore a grimy, red, low-cut dress a few sizes too big for her small frame, and a cheap ribbon in her mousy hair. Tears streamed like rain down her white cheeks, and her baffled brown eyes shone in the meager lamplight.
“Amie’s dead,” she sobbed. “They took ’er, and they sliced ’er up, and now she’s dead!”
Valyn scanned the room. He had no idea who the girl was, who Amie was, or what in ’Shael’s name was going on, but it didn’t sound pretty. Usually the locals had enough sense to leave the Kettral out of their vendettas and turf wars, but if he’d learned one thing on the Islands, it was that fear and rage made people unpredictable. Whatever the girl was talking about, it sounded bad. He glanced over at Lin. It didn’t seem like they were going to get much more out of Juren. There were a few more survivors that he wanted to hunt up, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to get caught up in some asinine local brawl at the Black Boat.
His friend, however, hadn’t moved. She was just staring at the girl, lips parted, but silent.
“You know her?” Valyn asked.
She nodded. “Rianne. She’s a whore. Works down by the docks, mostly, but she and her sister have a little garden on the hill above town. I used to buy firefruit from her in the spring.”
“Who’s Amie?” Valyn asked warily, keeping an eye on the seated patrons. Everyone was watching Rianne. No one had risen, but whispered conversations were starting up at a few of the tables, and men were easing back in their seats, freeing up the knives and cutlasses tucked in their belts, eyeing one another cautiously. None of the other patrons were Kettral, but evidently they, too, had learned the hard way to distrust surprises. Valyn measured the distance to the door, the gap between him and the other tables, running through a half dozen tactical responses if things went ugly.
“Amie was her sister,” Lin replied. Her eyes remained fixed on Rianne. She seemed oblivious of the tension in the room.
Rianne took a couple of steps forward, her bony hands beggared before her as though she were holding up an invisible body. The people at the nearest tables leaned back in their chairs, giving her space. She stared helplessly from one face to the next, as though searching for something, the nature of which she had long ago forgotten. Then she saw Lin.
“Ha Lin,” she whispered, dropping to her knees on the rough wooden floor. “You have to help me.” Valyn wasn’t sure if the posture was part of the plea, or if she simply lacked the strength to stand. “You’re a soldier. You’re Kettral. You can find them! Please.” She raked a hand through her tangled hair. Dark streaks lined her face, tears smeared with the charcoal she used to darken her eyes. “You have to help me.”
All eyes swiveled to the two soldiers.
“Not our concern,” Valyn murmured to his friend, tossing a couple of coins on the bar and getting ready to step past the kneeling woman.
Lin fixed him with an angry glare. “Whose concern is it?”
“Her father’s,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice low, trying to turn Lin away from the prying stares. “Her brother’s.”
“She doesn’t have a father. Or a brother. She and Amie were alone.”
“How in Hull did they end up on Hook?”
“Does it matter?” Lin snapped.
Valyn took a deep breath. “We can’t do this now,” he ground out. Rianne’s situation sounded horrible, tragic, but there was no way they could chase down every killer on Hook, no way they could defend every dockyard whore. Besides, even if they found the man responsible, the Eyrie explicitly forbade unauthorized violence against civilians. There were a thousand reasons to step past the girl, offer a polite condolence, and return to Qarsh. “This isn’t why we’re here.”
Lin stepped in close, close enough that he could smell the sea salt in her hair, opened her mouth to say something, and then looked over her shoulder, as though noticing the other patrons for the first time. Her lips tightened.
“So much for protecting the innocent people of Annur.”
Valyn swallowed a curse. All eyes were on him now, furtive, feral glances over the rims of tankards, calculating stares from the far end of the room. The whole thing was horseshit. They’d come to the Boat to get answers out of Juren, to learn something about the conspiracy to kill Valyn, to try to thwart a plot to overthrow the entire fucking empire. Evidently all it took to knock them off the scent was a sailor’s whore with a sob story. In fact, once you started thinking about plots, Rianne’s sudden, unexpected appearance looked pretty suspicious. He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again.
Quarrel if you must, Hendran wrote, but do so out of sight. Open division emboldens a foe.
Valyn had no idea what to make of the girl’s sudden arrival, but arguing about it with Ha Lin in the middle of a crowded tavern seemed like a poor way to proceed. Juren wasn’t going anywhere with his busted leg. Any secrets about the collapse of Manker’s would still be there to uncover a day later, a week later. There’s time, he thought to himself.
Besides, Lin had a point. Assuming Rianne was telling the truth, she, like Valyn, had lost family. She, like Valyn, wanted answers. Unlike Valyn, however, she was no Kettral. She lacked the tools to solve her own mystery, lacked the training to rectify a wrong. The memory of the corpses from Manker’s came back to him, bodies broken and bloated with water. Whatever else was going on, the Kettral were supposed to protect people, to guard citizens and defend the helpless. That, as much as the swords and the birds, was why Valyn had stepped onto the boat eight years earlier.
“What do you want us to do?” he asked warily.