“All I’m saying is that if this lot were professionals, then the ones who boarded the ship and cut them down weren’t your garden-variety pirates.”
“Well, well,” the trainer replied, looking around the cluster of cadets to see that everyone had followed the argument. “Even a blind horse finds the paddock once in a while.”
By Eyrie standards, the backhand remark counted as high praise. Valyn nodded, hiding his satisfaction. Sami Yurl’s lips tightened into a scowl.
“Ten minutes on deck,” Fane continued, glaring, “and only the imperial mascot, here, has been able to tell me a single worthwhile thing about this ’Kent-kissing wreck. I didn’t rope two birds into flying you out here just so you could spend the morning sticking your thumbs up one another’s asses. Go over it again. Use your eyes. Find me something worth knowing.”
Eight years earlier, the admonition would have shamed Valyn to his core. Such tongue-lashings, however, were standard fare on the Islands. He nodded crisply to Fane, then turned to Lin.
“Split up?” he asked. “You stay topside, I’ll check belowdecks again?”
“Whatever you say, O Divine Light of the Empire,” she responded with a smirk.
“Let me remind you,” Valyn said, eyes narrowing, “that you’re not as big as Fane.”
She put a cupped hand to her ear. “What was that? It sounded like … was it a threat?”
“And you’re just a girl.”
It was a meaningless crack on the Qirins, where more than a third of the soldiers were women. Other imperial forces would have scoffed at the idea of a mixed-gender fighting unit, but the Kettral handled unusual situations, situations in which stealth, impersonation, deception, and surprise were as important as brute strength and speed. Still, if Lin was going to needle him about his parentage, Valyn intended to give as good as he got.
“I wouldn’t want to have to turn you over my knee and paddle you,” he added, wagging a finger at her.
“You know that Shaleel taught us how to crush testicles, right?” Lin replied. “It’s pretty easy, actually, sort of like cracking a walnut.” She demonstrated with one hand, a quick, twisting gesture that made Valyn wince.
“Why don’t you stay up here,” he said, taking a good step backwards, “and I’ll make sure we didn’t miss anything in the hold.”
Lin squinted appraisingly. “It might be more like a chestnut, now that I think of it.…”
Valyn tossed back the hatch and dropped below before she could finish the sentence.
The ship’s hold was low and dim. A few bars of sunlight lanced through the unchinked cracks in the decking above, but most of the space lay in deep, thick shadow. In a fight like this, there usually wasn’t much to see belowdecks, and only a few of the other cadets had already been down there. Still, it paid to look places other people didn’t.
Valyn waited for his eyes to adjust, then moved ahead, picking his way cautiously around stray barrels and bales as the vessel rocked gently beneath him, waves lapping at the hull. Whoever hit the ship had made off with most of the cargo, if there had been any cargo to begin with. According to the ink seals, the barrels that remained carried wine from Sia, although most of that trade tended to follow the shorter, overland route to the capital. A few crates were still lashed against the bulkhead, and Valyn pried one open with his belt knife: bales of cotton, also from Sia. It was good cargo, but not something professionals would usually go after. He was just starting to crack open the next crate when what sounded like a quiet moan caught his ear.
Without thinking, he drew one of the two standard short blades strapped across his back.
The sound was coming from the bow of the ship, all the way up by the foremost scuppers. Fane’s Wing should have checked the vessel over already, should have made sure that everyone was either dead or tied up before Valyn and the rest of the cadets came anywhere close. Fane, however, was one of the Eyrie’s more impulsive trainers, more interested in swinging a blade than skulking around belowdecks, checking pulses. He would have given the hold a glance, to be sure—but at a glance, a gravely wounded man could easily pass for dead.
Briefly Valyn considered calling someone else. If there were a sailor still alive, Fane would want to know immediately. On the other hand, he wasn’t certain just what he’d heard, and he didn’t relish the idea of hollering for the whole group only to find some untended livestock milling around in the bow. After a quick glance over his shoulder, Valyn glided silently ahead, belt knife held down by his waist, short blade in a tight guard before him—standard position for close-quarters fighting.
The man was tucked all the way forward against the curve of the keel itself, slumped in a puddle of his own blood. For a moment Valyn thought he was dead, that the sound had been the groaning of hawser against capstan, or the protestation of wood warping beneath the sun. Then the sailor opened his eyes.
They shone in the meager light, baffled and tormented by pain.
Valyn took half a step forward, then stopped. Assume nothing. That was the entire first chapter of Hendran’s Tactics, a tome that virtually every Kettral had committed to memory. The man looked near death, but Valyn held back.
“Can you hear me?” he asked quietly. “How badly are you wounded?”
The sailor’s eyes rolled in his head as though searching for the source of the sound before coming to rest, finally, on Valyn.
“You…,” he groaned, the word gravelly and weak.
Valyn stared. He had never seen the man before, certainly not in his years on the Islands, but recognition filled that feverish gaze and pinned him to the spot.
“You’re delirious,” he said carefully, edging closer. Unless the man was a professional masker, he wasn’t faking. “Where are you wounded?”
“You have the eyes,” the sailor responded weakly.
Valyn froze. Usually when people referred to “the eyes,” they were talking about his father, Sanlitun, or his brother, Kaden, both of whom had been blessed with the famous burning gaze, flaming irises that marked them as the heirs to Intarra herself, as the rightful Emperors of Annur. Even his older sister, Adare, had that gaze—although as a woman, she would never sit the Unhewn Throne. Growing up, Valyn had been fiercely jealous of those eyes, had, in fact, almost blinded himself once with a burning twig while trying to light his own eyes ablaze. The truth was, though, that Valyn’s stare was no less unsettling: black pupils set in irises brown as char. Kaden’s eyes might be fire, Ha Lin said, but Valyn’s were the remains after the fire had guttered out.
“We came … for you,” the sailor insisted.
Valyn felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and the ship seemed to roll more treacherously with the swells.
“Why?” he asked. “Who is ‘we’?”
“Aedolians,” the man managed. “The Emperor sent us.”
The Aedolian Guard. That explained both the professionalism and the Liran steel. The personal bodyguards of the Emperor were both well trained and well supplied; aside from the Kettral, they were the most fabled troops in the empire, iron-willed men whose loyalty to the Annurian throne was the stuff of legend. The founder of their order, Jarl Genner, had decreed that they take no wives, father no children, and own no property, all to ensure their unstinting allegiance to the Emperor and to the Guard.
None of which explained their presence here, on a clipper three full weeks’ sail from the capital, all of them dying or already dead. Or who could board such a ship and kill these men, some of the finest troops in the world. Valyn glanced back over his shoulder into the murky gloom of the hold, but whoever had wreaked the havoc appeared to be long gone.
The soldier was panting at the effort and the pain of speech, but he clenched his jaw and continued. “A plot. There is a plot. We were to … take you … away … protect you.”
Valyn tried to make sense of the claim. There were plenty of nefarious political currents in Annur, but the Kettral had chosen the Qirin Islands as their training ground and home because they were hundreds of leagues from anywhere. Besides, the Qirins were populated by the Kettral. The Aedolian Guard was storied, but the Kettral were legend. Anyone who planned to attack the Islands would have to be mad.
“Wait here,” Valyn began, although where the man would go he had no idea. “I have to tell someone. Fane. Eyrie command.”
“No,” the Aedolian managed, yanking a bloody hand from his jerkin and reaching toward Valyn, his voice surprisingly powerful. “Someone here … maybe someone important … is part of it.…”
The words landed like a slap. “Who?” Valyn demanded. “Who’s a part of it?”
The soldier shook his head wearily. “Don’t know…”
His head dropped to the side. Bright crimson blood hemorrhaged from somewhere beneath the jerkin, splattering Valyn and the surrounding deck in fading spurts. An arterial wound, Valyn realized … only, an arterial wound killed in minutes, not days. The man should have bled out onto the deck by the time his attackers slipped back over the gunwales. He stepped forward to part the soldier’s jerkin carefully and stared at the long gash, then turned his attention to the gore-drenched hand that had dropped limp into the Aedolian’s lap.
“There’s no possible way…,” he muttered to himself. And yet, the evidence was clear.
The man had been holding his own artery, had forced his fingers in through the sagging rent in his flesh, found the slippery tube, and clamped it shut. It was possible—Ellen Finch had gone over the technique in medical training—but even Finch acknowledged that you’d be lucky to last a day in that state. The Aedolian had gone close to three, waiting for someone, praying to whatever god he had trusted in, a god who had fucked him over well and for good.
Valyn touched his fingers to the man’s neck. The pulse fluttered, faltered, then failed. He reached out to shut the eyes when Fane’s earsplitting roar yanked him upright.
“Cadets on deck! Bird incoming!”
Just as Valyn shoved open the hatch, an ear-rending screech split the morning air. He burned to tell someone what he’d just heard, but the soldier’s warning echoed in his ears: Someone here is part of it. At the moment, he wasn’t even sure he could have told anyone: all eyes were turned to the sky to see a kettral soar overhead, dark wings blotting the sun.
Even after eight years on the Islands, eight years learning to fly on, fight from, load up, and drop off of the massive birds, Valyn still wasn’t fully at ease with them. If the annals were correct, the species was older than men, older even than the Csestriim and the Nevariim, a throwback to the days when gods and monsters strode the earth. Though the Kettral had found them, had ostensibly tamed them, nothing in the dark, liquid eyes of the birds had ever looked tame to Valyn, and now, standing on the open deck as the great creature winged overhead, he thought he understood the terror of a mouse caught in the middle of a freshly mown field as the falcon takes to the air.
“Looks like the Flea’s bird,” Fane said, shading his eyes with a hand. “Although what he’s doing all the way out here I’ve got no ’Kent-kissing idea.”
Normally Valyn would have been intrigued. Although the Flea took his turn training cadets, he was one of the most deadly soldiers in the Eyrie’s very deadly collection, and spent most of his time flying missions in the northeast, into the savage Blood Cities, or against the Urghul, or to the south, where the jungle tribes constantly pressed up through the Waist. His arrival in the middle of a run-of-the-mill exercise was unusual, if not unprecedented. Such surprises helped to liven up the training, although, after Valyn’s encounter with the Aedolian, the black bird struck him as an inauspicious portent, and he looked over to take new stock of the cadets on deck. If the man hadn’t been lying, dark forces were in play on the Islands, and if Valyn had learned one thing with the Kettral, it was that surpises were safe only if you were on the delivering end.
Without warning, the bird tucked its wings, all seventy feet of them, tight against its body and, like a spear falling from the heavens, dropped toward the ship. Valyn and the rest of the cadets stared. All the Kettral could make flying mounts and dismounts; the creatures weren’t much good if you couldn’t get on and off them. But this? He’d never seen anyone come in so fast.
“There’s no way…,” Lin breathed beside him, shaking her head in horror. “There’s just no—”
The bird was upon them in a rush of wind and a maelstrom of kicked-up debris that almost knocked Valyn from his feet. Even as he shielded his eyes, he caught a glimpse of the creature’s talons reaching for the deck, a figure in Kettral blacks slipping loose from his harnesses, dropping to the boards, rolling smoothly to his feet. Before the wash of wind had subsided, the bird was gone, winging low over the waves to the north, and the Flea was there.
He didn’t look like much of a soldier. Where Adaman Fane was tall and built like a bull, the Flea was short and weathered, his tar-dark skin pockmarked from some childhood disease, a fuzz of gray hair hazing his head like smoke. The drop was a reminder, though, of what the man and his Wing were capable of. No one else made drops like that, not the other cadets, not the trainers, not Adaman Fane—and onto a moving ship! If Valyn had tried the same entry over water, he would have been lucky to walk away without shattering all his ribs. Over a pitching deck … forget it. He’d always thought the other Kettral were stretching the truth just a bit when they claimed that the Flea had flown more than a thousand successful missions, but that …
“That was uncharacteristically flamboyant,” Fane said with a raised eyebrow.
The Flea grimaced. “Sorry. Command sent me.”
“And in a ’Kent-kissing hurry.”
The smaller man nodded. He glanced over the assembled cadets, seemed to pause on Valyn, then took in the rest of the group before returning his attention to Fane. “You and your Wing are to be airborne as soon as possible. Yesterday, if you can manage it. You’ll follow me north. Sendra’s Wing’s already on the way.”
“Three wings?” Fane asked, grinning. “Sounds exciting. Where we headed?”
“Annur,” the Flea responded. He didn’t seem to share Fane’s enthusiasm. “The Emperor is dead.”