*
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.
Not all of the cadets resisted. The pain and exhaustion mounted every day, every hour, every minute, until it seemed that the sun had ground to a halt in its course through the heavens and the unbearable suffering would go on forever, longer than forever, an eternity of misery devised by Meshkent himself. The verdant shore of Arin beckoned, a paradise of leisure and ease to be had just by … stopping, by giving up. Valyn finally understood the true genius of the offer. Put a man’s back to the wall, and he’s got no choice but to fight; offer him a comfortable retirement before the age of twenty, and you learn who’s committed to the cause. Valyn watched with a pang of exhausted envy as one, then two, then six cadets abandoned the Trial, gave themselves up to the quiet blandishments of the trainers.
Don’t even think about it, he muttered to himself, straining to lug yet another sand-filled barrel out of the sea. Whatever the Flea claimed, failure meant Arin, Arin meant never leaving the Islands, and that meant leaving Kaden and Adare vulnerable, Amie and Ha Lin unavenged. Don’t even dream about it.
On the fifth day, he found himself next to Gwenna, both of them harnessed like oxen to a large cart filled with small boulders. Jakob Rallen, the Master of Cadets, sat perched atop the pile, a whip in his right hand.
“Onward, mules!” he shouted in that shrill voice of his, cracking the whip close enough to Valyn’s ear that it drew blood. “Onward.”
Gwenna glanced over. Half her face had purpled with a vicious bruise, but there was no surrender in those green eyes. “On three?” she gasped, leaning forward to brace herself against the halter.
“What if we just strangled him with the whip and called it a day?” Valyn asked, forcing his weight against the collar, driving with his legs until the whole wagon creaked reluctantly into motion. The whip came down again, this time nicking Gwenna’s cheek.
“Strangling’s not my style,” she replied. She was a head shorter than Valyn, but she was strong, and with the two of them hauling the cart, it slowly gained speed, jolting over the rocky ground.
“How ’bout a flickwick in his bed?” Valyn gasped, heaving air into his ragged lungs as he strained against the traces.
“Too quick. Plus, a slob like him—we’d be scraping gobbets of fat off the ceiling.”
Valyn grinned in spite of the pain. “What if we toss him out of the cart and drag the thing over him?”
“I’ll follow your lead, oh my prince,” Gwenna replied before another crack of the whip silenced both of them.
He caught occasional glimpses of Ha Lin. On the third day, he managed to watch her briefly as she swam the harbor, dragging a barge behind her, her face a rictus of determination. He wanted to call out, to offer some encouragement, but it was all he could do to stand, and she was clearly past hearing anything but the salt waves sloshing in her ears. He tried to linger, to wait for her to reach the breakwater, but one of the trainers drove a hard fist into his kidney and sent him stumbling off down the rocks for yet another torturous circuit of the coast.
Each evening, the grinding midday sun bled into the horizon, and Valyn struggled on in darkness, shivering and chattering in the waves, his mind worn to a dull nub, his body depleted past pain, past suffering, into dead, leaden numbness.
At some point on what he thought was the sixth day, he found himself side by side in the surf with Laith, the two of them wrestling a swamped smallboat up out of the waves.
“Pull,” Valyn urged him, straining at the ropes himself until he thought his tendons would tear. “Pull!”
“If you tell me to pull one more time,” Laith responded breathlessly, hauling for all he was worth, “I am going to put down these ropes and bash the nose into your royal face.”
Valyn had no idea if it was a joke or not. The other cadet certainly sounded serious, but after six days of dead rat and endless agony, he didn’t care. “Pull!” he shouted again, bursting into helpless laughter. Some dim, lost part of him recognized the insanity in the sound, but it was powerless to stop it. “Pull, you fucker!” he screamed.
Laith bellowed right back at him, words as crazed and desperate as his own, and together they dragged that boat up onto the shingle only to be told to dump it, right it, and then swim it out to the ship swinging at anchor a mile offshore.
Valyn was convinced during that swim that he was going to die. His heart had never hammered so hard inside his chest. He felt like every breath was bringing up blood and lung, and when he spat into the waves, he saw pink flecking the foam. It was possible, he knew, for the body to simply quit. Cadets had died of burst hearts before, their bodies battered, then broken under the physical strain. Fine, he panted to himself, towing the recalcitrant boat through the waves toward that ship that never seemed to grow any closer. This is a fine place to die.
When he heaved himself onto the deck at last, the Flea and Adaman Fane were there, scowling and shouting something Valyn couldn’t understand. What were the words? He peered around blearily for something to haul, to hit, to hurt, but there was nothing, just the wide expanse of scrubbed deck. As he stared in stupefaction, the words started to penetrate, like water dripping through a poorly thatched roof.
“… you hear me, you idiot?” Fane was shouting, waving a thick finger at him from a few feet away. “You’re done, at least for now. I suggest you hit the deck and get a few hours’ sleep.”
Valyn stared, his jaw slack. Then his legs collapsed beneath him and he fell into stunned, desperate darkness.