The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Any other time, Adare would have been frightened for her councillor, furious. Any other time she would have been hollering for a physician, for a cot, for a change of clothes and bandages. In that moment, however, as she stood trembling just inside the door, she found all thoughts but one had been scrubbed utterly from her mind.

  “Where is my son?” she asked in a voice dry as ash. “Sanlitun? Where is he?”

  Nira grimaced. “He’s alive.”

  “Alive?” Adare demanded, fear driving her voice high, then higher. “Alive? You were watching him, protecting him, and you show up looking like … like this, and all you can tell me is that he’s alive?”

  The Nira Adare remembered would have bristled at that. She would have bashed Adare’s knuckles with her cane, or smacked her across the side of the head. Now, she could barely manage a nod.

  “He was alive when I got out. He will be still. The bastard needs him.”

  “Who?” Adare demanded. “What bastard?”

  The woman met her eyes, and Adare felt a hole open in her gut.

  “Il Tornja,” she breathed.

  Nira nodded wearily. “He’s got your son. Your son and my brother both.”

  For a moment Adare could only stare. She watched her hands reach for a glass as though they had their own mind, watched them fill a delicate flute to the rim with wine. He has my son. She started to pull the glass toward her, then looked again at Nira, slumped in her chair, and passed the wine to her. The old woman gazed at it with those defeated eyes as though she’d never seen a glass before. Adare poured one for herself, then drank deep. Nira twitched, as though waking from sleep, and followed suit. When she spoke again, there was a flicker of heat in her voice. Just a flicker, then gone.

  “I’m sorry, girl.”

  Adare drained the glass, shook her head, then poured another. She could feel the questions pressing in, dozens of them, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. Suddenly it seemed important to remain quiet, as though if she didn’t ask what had happened, if Nira never answered, none of it would be real. As long as they stayed silent, it could be a dream.

  When she’d drained a second glass, she placed her palms against the table, slowly, deliberately, as though the surface could hold her up. She studied the wood’s grain, lingering on the delicate lines and whorls, as though she could lose herself in that imaginary topography. Coward, she thought grimly. I am a coward. Her gaze was heavy as a millstone as she hauled it back to Nira.

  “Tell me.”

  The woman nodded, drank her wine down in a great gulp, then nodded again.

  “I should have killed him,” she said, her voice an angry ghost. “Should have killed him back in Aats-Kyl.”

  “But the collar,” Adare protested. “That leash of fire. It broke?”

  Nira snorted. “A thing like that doesn’t break. It gets unmade.”

  “But he’s not a leach.”

  “No. Oshi is.”

  Adare stared, baffled. “Oshi hates him. Oshi would have slaughtered him if you told him to.”

  “That was before the Csestriim started talking.” Nira shook her head bitterly. “I was a fucking fool. I thought, because I put that noose around his neck and told him to help, to fix what he had done, that he was helping, fixing. They’d sit for hours, il Tornja asking his questions: ‘What’s the first thing you remember? What’s the first face you remember seeing? When did you first cry? When did you first see your own blood?’ Like that. Hundreds a’ questions. Thousands.”

  She blew out a long, unsteady breath, winced as something shifted painfully inside her, then continued.

  “Seemed useless to me—all that chatter. We weren’t made what we are through a bunch a’ questions, and I told him that. He just smiled—you know that smile—told me that before he could fix a thing, he had to see where it was cracked. I thought he was just stalling—that it was all useless but harmless. Thought it wouldn’t hurt ta wait a little longer.…”

  She trailed off, but Adare could already see what happened next.

  “Il Tornja turned him,” she said. “He turned your brother to his side somehow, and Oshi removed the collar.”

  Nira nodded. “My poor brain-buggered brother … He barely knew the sky from the sea on a good day. One time I had to persuade him not ta go ta war with the trees. He wanted to demand fealty from the fuckin’ fish. He didn’t know … anything, and all the time that Csestriim bastard was at work inside his busted head, twisting history, erasing memories, replacing them with his own lies. It must have been so easy.”

  “And you didn’t try to stop it?”

  “I didn’t know. Not until the collar was off. Then I tried ta stop them both.” She shaded her eyes with a withered hand, as though the memory of what had happened was too bright. When she spoke again, the words were a whisper. “I woulda killed him then—my brother. I tried. But he’s strong. Oshi’s broken, but still so, so strong.”

  She ran a hand absently over the burned stubble of her scalp, winced, then pulled her fingers away.

  “He attacked you?”

  “Yes. Maybe.” Nira paused, shook her head. “The flames were flyin’—that’s sure as shit—but I can’t say he recognized me.”

  Nira was staring at the carafe of wine. After a moment, she took it in one withered hand and poured them both another drink.

  “You used your own power,” Adare said slowly.

  The old woman snorted quietly. “Ya expect me to fight one a’ the world’s strongest leaches with my fingernails?”

  “I thought,” Adare replied, choosing her words carefully, “that you tried not to use your power. That dipping too deep and too often into his well is what drove your brother mad in the first place. That it’s what drove all the Atmani mad.”

  Nira stared into her wine, swirled it, then raised it to her lips as though she hadn’t heard. She finished off the glass in a single pull, and then set it back on the table so carefully the crystal made no sound against the wood.

  “Yeah,” she said finally, staring at the glass with rheumy eyes. “It was.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Nira asked, raising her eyes to meet Adare’s.

  “Is that a concern now?”

  Nira laughed a sharp, jagged laugh. “Ya mean, have I gone mad?”

  Adare studied the old woman. Nira had been there almost from the beginning, since the day Adare fled the Dawn Palace. She was the only person in the world who knew everything.

  “I need you,” Adare replied at last. “If we’re going to survive this, if we’re going to defeat il Tornja, I need you strong, and I need you sane.”

  “And what good,” Nira asked quietly, “did staying sane do me? Hmm? More than a thousand years I didn’t touch my well. I could feel it all the time. Right there. I wanted it in a way you can’t know, worse than any wet bride ever wanted a nimble tongue between her legs, worse than a dying woman wants water.” She shook her head. “Sweet ’Shael, how I wanted it.”

  “But you didn’t,” Adare breathed, forcing herself to hold that horrible gaze.

  “I don’t need you ta remind me,” the old woman snapped, “what I’ve done and not done.” For a moment there was something like the old sharpness on her tongue, a hint of the familiar fire in her eyes. Then it went vague and distant all over again. “What good did it do?”

  “You saved your brother,” Adare said, pronouncing the words slowly, as though she were speaking to a small child.

  “Saved him? Saved him from what? For more than a thousand years I watched him, fed him, kept him drugged half to dreamland, kept him from remembering the worst of what we’ve done, and for what? So I could hand him over to the bastard that broke him.” She gritted her teeth. “I shoulda let him die centuries ago,” Nira growled. “Shoulda dragged a knife across his gristly neck when I still could.”

  “He was your brother,” Adare said, uncertain how else to respond.

  “All the more reason ta show him mercy.”
/>   “A knife across the throat isn’t mercy.”

  Nira studied her grimly. “Whatever you think you know about mercy, girl—it’s wrong.”

  Any other time, Adare would have argued. Now, it hardly seemed to matter. Il Tornja was free, he’d twisted one of the Atmani over to his side, and he had Adare’s own son. She could hardly bring herself to think about that last fact, as though if she ignored it long enough it might turn out to be a mistake, some misguided notion rattling about in an ancient woman’s addled mind. Only Nira wasn’t mad; not yet. There was still too much sense in everything she said. Too much regret.

  “And Sanlitun?” Adare asked, the words meek, almost a supplication. “Is he … all right?” She could feel the tears pressing, the rage welling, hot and purple beneath her tongue. “Has il Tornja hurt him?”

  The thought of Sanlitun’s fear and confusion had gouged at Adare like a knife the entire ride south. He had his wet nurses, but she was the only one who could reliably soothe him, the only one who could drive back the terrors he was too small to articulate. Her disappearance must have seemed like a betrayal, and now Nira was gone, too. Who would comfort him? Who would hold him close and whisper half-remembered lullabies while he fretted himself to sleep? Adare imagined him alone in some cold castle tower, darkness pressing in around him, his tiny fingers opening and closing hopelessly on his blankets, grasping them over and over as though the soft wool could offer any comfort, searching in vain for his mother’s face, listening for her voice.…

  “The child is fine,” Nira said, her voice cutting through Adare’s own waking horror. “More pampered by il Tornja’s wet nurse than he ever was by you.”

  “But why?”

  Nira grimaced. “Leverage. Same reason he stopped Oshi from killing me. He needs you. He needs us both.”

  “Needs us for what?”

  “To get to the leach.”

  Adare shook her head, furious, baffled. “What leach?”

  “The one your brother keeps locked up inside the tower.”

  Adare scrambled to think of the girl’s name. “Triste?”

  She remembered the reports. When Triste first appeared in the Dawn Palace in the middle of a mound of corpses, Adare’s spies had tried to learn who she was, where she had come from. There was a swirl of rumors: the girl was Skullsworn, she was an Antheran spy, or an Aedolian-trained leach bound somehow to the new emperor. One witness to the massacre in the Jasmine Court swore that he saw the tattoo of a leina around her neck. None of it made any sense. All anyone could say for sure was that she had arrived with Kaden, killed more than a hundred people, then been locked away. Adare shook her head. “What does il Tornja want with Triste?”

  “What does he want?” Nira raised her brows. “He wants the little bitch dead.”

  Adare stared at the older woman, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. For months she’d been juggling a hundred variables in her mind: the Urghul and the Waist tribes, the Sons of Flame and the Army of the North, il Tornja, and Kaden, and Long Fist. It was like studying a ko board as wide as the world itself, armies of thousands and tens of thousands, an empire of millions, the patterns ramifying across oceans and deserts, steppe and forest. In all those twisting lines of attack and retreat, Adare had barely glanced at the tiny stone that was Triste.

  “She must be dangerous,” she said slowly.

  “’Course she’s dangerous,” Nira spat. “’Cording ta your report, took her less than half a morning ta turn your palace into a slaughterhouse.”

  Adare took a deep breath, tried to think through it slowly, calmly. “We knew she was a leach, but there are hundreds of leaches in the world. Thousands. Il Tornja isn’t trying to kill them all. He must be frightened of Triste.…”

  “The bastard is Csestriim. He doesn’t get frightened.”

  “Aware, then … of something we are not. Maybe he knows who she is. Maybe he knows the source of her power, her well.” Adare grimaced. “She could be another Balendin, and Intarra knows we can’t handle another Balendin.”

  Nira nodded wearily. “That’s how I read it, too. She’s a knife. One your general doesn’t want your brother to have.”

  “Kaden,” Adare said, weighing her brother’s name as she spoke it, “Kaden is not entirely the naïve monastic type I had expected. His republic is a disaster, but it was a surprise, one that nearly broke us for the war in the north. I can see why il Tornja would want to take away his knives.”

  Slowly, grudgingly, a shape began to resolve out of Adare’s initial terror and confusion. Her breath still came hot and ragged in her throat, but she no longer felt that the heart inside her chest might just explode. My son is safe, she said, the words like air in her lungs, like sun on her skin. My son is safe. Il Tornja had betrayed her, but a part of Adare had always expected the betrayal. If she thought too much about Sanlitun in il Tornja’s clutches, her tiny, cantankerous, fire-eyed child swaddled at the breast of some complicit bitch of a wet nurse, if she let herself see all that, she might still collapse. But il Tornja had given her something else to look at, a problem to solve, an enemy to destroy.

  “So I just need to get to her. To Triste. Get to her, then kill her.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I get my son back.”

  Nira stared, opened her mouth as though to respond, ran a tongue over her crooked teeth, then turned aside to spit onto the polished hardwood floor. “Ya still believe ya can bargain with him? After all this? Ya still think you can trust him?”

  “Of course not,” Adare replied, forcing her hands to unclench, her shoulders to relax. “But il Tornja has reason to keep our alliance. My name gives him legitimacy. Even after the situation with Triste is … finished … he needs me.”

  The words sounded true, but they tasted wrong on her tongue, poisonous. Bile rose in her throat. The truth was, she had no idea what il Tornja intended, no idea why he wanted Triste dead, no idea what he would do if Adare refused, or if she agreed. Not that it mattered. He had her son, and so she would kill Triste. The rest could wait.

  “Kaden was right,” she said finally.

  Nira cocked her head to the side, the question unspoken.

  Adare exhaled wearily. “He said il Tornja’s mind was too wide for me to comprehend, for any of us.” Her hands were clenched into white, desperate fists on the table before her. “He planned this,” she went on. “When the offer of the treaty first arrived, he was planning this.”

  Nira nodded grudgingly. “If not before.”

  Adare’s mind filled with the memory of Andt-Kyl, of the Csestriim general seated cross-legged atop the signal tower issuing orders no one could understand, commanding his men to flee, or fight, or lay down their arms, watching them slaughtered or slaughtering according to some logic only he could comprehend, studying a pattern in the bloodshed that only he could see. His men called him a genius, but it was more than that. Battle’s chaotic scrawl was, to Ran il Tornja, a fully legible text. He had arrived in Andt-Kyl to fight a force assembled by a god, and he had won.

  The spectacle had been terrifying enough when il Tornja still battled Adare’s foes; even then, the ruthless, alien genius of the Csestriim general had made some mortal part of her quail. And now the tide had shifted.

  Adare stared at Nira’s ravaged face and scalp, at the burns and the dried blood where the cuts had broken open. In all the haste and confusion, one fact was awfully, perfectly clear: Ran il Tornja wasn’t Adare’s general anymore. The time had come to face him down, to fight him, to pitch her own mind and will against that monstrous brilliance, and Adare realized, her breath shaking in her chest, she knew, the certainty lodged inside her like a blade, that there was no chance, no hope, no possible way that she could win.

  17

  He could remember a time when darkness had been a quality of the world itself, a thing of the sky when the sun sagged below the horizon and the light leaked out; a thing of the sea when you dove deep enough for the weight of salt water
to smother the shine; a thing of castle keeps and caves after someone snuffed the last lamp and the great stone space went black. Even the darkness of Hull’s Hole, that absolute absence of light filling the cave’s snaking chambers: you went into it, then you came out. Or if you failed to come out, if the slarn tore you apart, then you slid into the longer darkness of death. It had seemed an awful fate once, being stuck in that endless black. That was before the blade had taught Valyn hui’Malkeenian a greater, more terrible truth: the outer dark, for all its horrors—the old, cold dark of caverns or the bottomless dark of the dead—it was nothing when set beside the darkness carried inside, a darkness bled into poisoned flesh and carved across ruined eyes, a darkness of the self.

  Valyn sat with his back against a balsam’s rough trunk. He knew the tree from the sap’s scent, knew the trees beside it: hemlocks and larch ringing the small clearing. There were a hundred smells on the air, a thousand—decaying needles and mouse droppings, thick moss and wet granite, horse piss and horse sweat, leather and iron—all woven into a rough fabric cast across his mind.

  He couldn’t see a fucking thing.

  From overhead, through the branches of the trees, the sunlight filtered down, hot and dark. He turned his eyes upward, opened them as wide as he could, kept them open even as they dried out and started to sting. You could go blind looking at the sun, but he was already blind. Maybe if he stared long enough, something, some hint of fire, would sear through the scarred lenses. That was the thought anyway, the hope. Now, as always, he saw nothing.

  A few paces off, the Urghul were preparing camp. Valyn could hear them hobbling the horses and rummaging in saddle packs. He could smell the newly kindled fire, the stolen whiskey passed from hand to filthy hand, the blood of the elk the outriders had brought down a few hours earlier. If he bothered, he could make out conversations, all of the individual voices rising and falling in tuneless counterpoint. He couldn’t understand the language, though, and so instead of trying to untangle the words, he listened to the breathing of the Urghul as they went about their tasks, to the dozens of heartbeats. Those sounds were more useful than words, anyway. If the horsemen were going to attack him, they weren’t likely to announce it. He would hear the approaching murder in a quickened pulse first, in breath rasping too fast between parted lips.