23
Three hours wasn’t much sleep, not even by Kettral standards, but after seven unrelenting days and nights, each more brutal than the one before, Valyn fell to the hard deck of the ship that would take them to Irsk, the most remote of the Qirin chain, as if the planks were a feather mattress, slept a blank sleep with no dreams, and woke only when an ungentle boot gouged into his ribs. He rolled to his feet, baffled and disoriented, but groping for his belt knife all the same, trying desperately to remember where he was, to find his footing on the rolling deck, to ready himself for a continuation of the suffering that had become his life.
“You’ve got an hour before we make land.” It was Chent Rall, a short veteran built like a bulldog with a personality to match. “I suggest you use it to get below and stuff down some chow.”
“Chow?” Valyn repeated dumbly, trying to shake the fog from his head. All around him, the other trainers were rousting their charges from where they had dropped like dead men to the deck. The ship was rolling softly with the swells, her masts creaking as the boat heeled to port, running before a decent southerly wind.
“Yeah, chow,” Rall repeated. “The stuff you put in your mouth. The good news is: you’re done eating rat. The bad news is, after this you might be done eating, period. Not a lot to munch on down in the Hole.”
Valyn didn’t know what the man was talking about, but there was a gravity to that last word, a menace.
“What’s the hole?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. You want to eat, or you want to chat?”
Valyn’s stomach rumbled angrily and he nodded. He had no idea what lay ahead, but, as Hendran wrote, A choice between tactics and food is no choice at all. A soldier cannot live on tactics. He cannot improvise food.
The vessel’s tiny galley was a madness of clutching hands, raised voices, and the stench of unwashed bodies as twenty-one starving cadets jostled one another to shove the steaming food into their mouths. It wasn’t much—bean stew, a couple trenchers of diced meat—but it was warm and, more important, it wasn’t rat. Along with everyone else, Valyn shoveled up great handfuls and stuffed it into his mouth, wary that this apparent kindness, like so many others during the week, would prove a trap.
Someone touched his shoulder and he spun around, raising his fists, to find himself looking into Ha Lin’s eyes. She had always been slender, but the exertions of the past days had rendered her positively skeletal. One of her eyes had swollen shut, and the skin surrounding it faded from purple to a jaundiced yellow. Someone or something had opened a new gash across her forehead, one deep enough to leave a nasty scar.
“Eira’s mercy, Lin,” he gasped, choking on the water he had been gulping down.
She grimaced. “Save it. We’re all beaten up.”
That was true enough. Just in the course of grubbing his meager share of food, Valyn had seen broken fingers, busted noses, and newly missing teeth. His own third rib stabbed into him at every breath, and he had a suspicion he’d snapped it, but no idea when, or how. He’d always thought the veterans acquired their scars flying actual missions, but he was starting to wonder if they took the worst of their beatings during the Trial.
“How was it?” he asked, struggling to find the right words. “The last week, I mean.”
“Terrible,” she responded flatly, “just the way they planned it.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? You don’t see me on a ship to Arin.” There was something of the old steel back in her voice.
“Of course not. But you look—” He put a hand on her arm. It was thin as a stick. “How are you holding up?”
“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 “fucking 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.