20
The morning sun blazed through the window, bright and unyielding. With a grunt, Valyn raised a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare. The entire room was white: white walls, white ceiling, even the wide pine boards of the floor had been scoured, sanded, and scrubbed so many times, they were bleached of all color. The place smelled of the strong alcohol the Kettral used to scrub out wounds and the herbal poultices they plastered on after the cleaning was done. Valyn would have preferred to move his bed into the cool shadow at the side of the room, but Wilton Ren, the medic on duty, had given him strict instructions about staying still and calm, instructions he would have happily ignored save for the lance of pain that drove through his chest every time he so much as shifted.
According to Ren, they’d dragged him in, pulled the arrow, stitched the wound, and bandaged it, all while he was unconscious. When he finally woke, after a day and a night, his first thought had not been for the puncture in his shoulder or the one who fired the arrow, but for Ha Lin. Whatever went wrong on the sniper field, he’d survived it. He had no such assurances about Lin’s meeting with Balendin. Valyn tried to drag himself out of bed half a dozen times, reaching the door before he collapsed on his final effort. That was where Ren found him.
“Look,” the man grumbled, hauling him up and depositing him back in the bunk, “I’m the medic here. People bust an arm, they come to me. Lose an eye, they come to me. Crack their fool heads on a barrel drop—they come to me. If there was something wrong with your friend, I’d have heard about it. Now,” he said, eyeing Valyn appraisingly. “You can stay in that ’Shael-spawned bed on your own, or I can go get a nice length of stout rope and keep you there.” Although Ren was well into his fifth decade and hadn’t been out of the infirmary in half that time, he had a neck like a bull, arms thicker than Valyn’s legs, and a scarred face that suggested he’d be just as happy to beat his patient into unconsciousness as to heal him. Despite the man’s rough delivery, however, his words calmed Valyn. Qarsh was a small island. If Lin was hurt, the news would travel quickly.
He knew he ought to be thankful about his own injury. The arrow was a through-shot, missing all the main arteries and organs, missing his lung by the space of a finger. The medics had gotten to the wound quickly enough to clean it out with some sort of fluid that burned like acid, but that seemed to have stopped any infection. With a little bit of rest, Ren said, he’d make a full recovery. That kind of luck didn’t come around too often, and a soldier was supposed to appreciate it when it did, but Valyn was in no mood to be appreciative. Once he got past his immediate concern for Ha Lin, the reality landed on him like a stone: Annick had shot him, had drawn a bow in broad daylight in front of two trainers and put an arrow through his chest.
When Ren came in with a bowl of broth, Valyn beckoned him over. His voice was too weak to do much more than whisper, but the words came out harsh and hard.
“Did they get her?”
“Get her?” Ren replied, setting the bowl on the bedside table. “Get who?”
“Annick!” he rasped. “The girl who fucking shot me!”
The medic shrugged. “Didn’t take much getting. She seemed as surprised as anyone else that the arrow wasn’t a stunner.”
Valyn stared. “How could she be surprised? She’s the one who shot it! She shot three of them!”
“But only the one that hit you had a chisel point. The other two were stunners.”
“No,” Valyn said, shaking his head at the memory of the arrow scudding through the dirt beside him. Seeing the point on the second arrow was what started him running in the first place. “No. At least two had live heads.”
“You can tell it to Rallen,” Ren replied with a shrug. “The Master of Cadets is holding an inquiry. Looks like she’s going to be nailed for combat negligence. There’ll be a review of her conduct, and she’ll be suspended right up until Hull’s Trial.”
The words hit Valyn like a hammer.
“Combat negligence,” he managed. “And in the meantime, she’s walking around free?”
“Where d’you want her to be?”
Valyn’s mouth hung open. “How did she explain the fact that she had even one live head in a training contest?”
“Said something happened to the head. Said the arrow that hit you was supposed to be a stunner, but that she must have got it wrong somehow.”
“I’ll say something happened to the ’Kent-kissing head,” Valyn erupted. He tried to sit up, but pain blazed through his wound and he subsided weakly on the cot, exhaling between clenched teeth. “What happened to the head is that she switched a stunner for a razor.”
“Look,” Ren said, wagging the spoon at him. “I don’t know all the details, but we’re on the Islands. You’re with the Kettral. This isn’t a sewing circle. Give men and women bows and swords and tell them to start leaping off birds and blowing things up, and every so often someone catches an unhealthy bit of sharp steel somewhere it doesn’t belong. I’ve been here a while and I’ve seen it before. A stunner and a chisel don’t look all that different, especially when you’re in the middle of a fight.”
“And Rallen is buying this?” Valyn asked, amazed into something like acceptance.
“Rallen’s seen it before, too. It’s a training accident. Not worth sacrificing the best sniper in the class for.”
Valyn shook his head, unable to respond.
Ren clapped him on the shoulder with a hard, callused hand. “Look, kid. I know how it feels. You took an arrow through the chest. You’re angry. But there’s such a thing as plain old shit luck. You may be the son of the Emperor, but not everything’s a plot against you.”
The medic stumped out the door, leaving Valyn with those words spinning in his head. Not everything’s a plot against you. It was tempting to believe that, to believe that the whole thing was just a horrible mistake with a surprisingly fortunate outcome, but there was the Aedolian to consider. The ship was coming to take him away from the Islands. To keep him safe. According to the murdered man, anyone could be involved in the plot, anyone at all.
*
Annick came just before the evening meal. Valyn was staring out the window, trying to decide if the boat in the middle distance was an imperial sloop or a trading vessel when the door swung open soundlessly. He looked over to find the sniper standing still and silent in the doorway, the ever-present bow in her hand. He realized, with a twist of fear, that it was strung.
“Valyn,” she said, nodding curtly. Her eyes, blue as arctic ice, never left his face.
He tensed. Normally he’d have the advantage in close-quarters combat, but even sitting up took a major effort; he wasn’t going to be wrestling her to the ground, not in his condition. He thought about calling for Ren, but the medic was over in the mess hall taking his dinner and filling yet another bowl of stew for Valyn. It would have to be the belt knife, then.
The knife lay beside the remains of an apple on the wooden table beside the bed. He figured the odds at about half that he could reach it and throw before Annick fished an arrow out of her quiver, and he counted himself lucky at that. It seemed like a long time since he’d had a chance at a fair fight.
“What do you want?” he asked, shifting slowly toward the table, freeing his right hand from the blankets in the process.
“I didn’t try to kill you,” she said simply.
Valyn barked a laugh that sent a stab of pain through his chest. “You’re here to apologize?”
Annick tilted her head to one side, considering the question. “No,” she responded after a moment. “I’m here to tell you I didn’t try to kill you.”
Valyn went for the knife. He was slower than he’d expected, slower than he hoped, but the ’Kent-kissing thing was only a few feet away. If he could just … Before he’d even extended his arm, Annick nocked, drew, and released. The blade went skittering away across the floor, while an arrow sprouted in its place, still quivering from the impact. Valyn watched it go still, then let his hand fall. That was it, then. The sniper had him pinned down and there wasn’t a thing he could do.
She considered him calmly, another arrow already nocked to her string. It seemed like a poor way to die—murdered in an infirmary cot—but then, he supposed all the ways looked pretty poor to the person doing the dying.
“So you’re part of it,” he said wearily. It was a vague relief to put a face to the conspiracy at last, even if it wasn’t the face he’d expected.
Annick paused before responding. “Part of what?”
“Whatever the fuck it is,” he said, gesturing weakly with a hand. “My father. Me. Kaden.” He closed his eyes at the thought of his brother, unwarned, unprepared, going about the strange, simple life that had been decreed for him right up until the moment someone put a blade in his back. It wouldn’t be hard, all the way out there at the end of the empire.
Annick tapped at her bowstring with a finger. “You’re not making sense. Has the medic given you something to dull the pain?”
Valyn started to respond, then checked himself. Maybe she was playing games, taunting him during his final moments. On the other hand, Annick didn’t play games. She seemed to have only two goals—training or killing—and if she really wanted to kill him, she would have shot his neck a moment earlier, not his knife.
“Why did you come here?” he asked guardedly, a sick hope blooming inside him.
“To tell you I didn’t try to kill you,” she said for the third time, eyes hard as chips of glass. “If I wanted to kill you, there are better ways than the middle of the day in the middle of a contest.”
“Well, it’s a ’Kent-kissing good thing that you weren’t shooting this well yesterday,” Valyn said, gesturing to the arrow lodged in the table. “You would have put that chisel point right through the back of my head rather than my shoulder.”
Annick narrowed her eyes. Were it not for the insanity of the notion, Valyn would have thought he’d insulted her professional pride. “The tips were wrong,” she said finally. “They threw off the shots.”
Valyn considered that. “You mean you thought you were firing stunners rather than chisel points.” It made an unexpected sort of sense. The difference in the weight and shape of an arrowhead could account for the missed shots, especially over that sort of range.
“I mean,” Annick corrected him, “the heads are wrong.” She jerked her chin toward the one sticking from the side table. “That’s what they ripped out of you. I found it in the other room when I came in. It’s the other reason I came.”