The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Nira’s smile was a knife. “A woman behaves a certain way when she believes she’s the most dangerous bitch in the room. Ya’re used to it,” she said, nodding at Kegellen, “ain’t ya? Ya’ve been the most dangerous bitch in the room a long time, eh?”

  The larger woman made a face. “Bitch is such an unpleasant word.…”

  Nira chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t mind it, myself, but then, I’ve had more time to grow into it.”

  “Surely you undersell your considerable charms.”

  Kegellen’s fan had stopped moving. With her free hand, she patted absently at the wooden pins holding up her hair.

  “I’ll tell ya what I undersell,” Nira said. “I undersell the number a’ men I’ve killed. I undersell the times I’ve put a blade inside some traitor’s ribs and fucking ripped. I undersell the thousands a’ acres I’ve burned down to the ground. I got tired a while back of people screamin’ when they heard my name, and so I undersell that, too, but because you’re laborin’ under some badly skewed impressions, I’m makin’ an exception for you. Call it a courtesy, me sharin’ this little fact: you are not the most dangerous bitch in this room, not while I’m standin’ here.” She cocked her head to the side. “I know your mind’s fat and slow, so I hope I made that clear.”

  The mirth had vanished from Kegellen’s eyes. She studied Nira in silence for a few heartbeats, then turned to Adare.

  “It seems your minister thinks more highly of herself than she does of her own emperor.”

  Adare just shook her head. “Whatever wedge you’re trying to drive, don’t bother.”

  Nira’s tirade was hardly a welcome introduction, but Adare had decided in the moment to let her run with it. The old woman was right about one thing: Kegellen was dangerous. Adare had been trying to unthread the massive net the woman had thrown over Annur’s underworld even before she rose to Minister of Finance. The Queen of the Streets was excellent at covering her tracks, but if you spilled enough blood, you couldn’t help but leave stains. Kegellen claimed now to be serving as a loyal representative of Annur, but whatever her pretensions of legitimacy, she hadn’t given up her underground empire. Though it galled Adare to admit it, Kegellen was a far more effective ruler than Adare herself. It wouldn’t hurt to blunt the woman’s confidence, to make her second-guess any plans she might be laying for betrayal.

  “Thousands murdered,” Kegellen mused. “Whole fields aflame.” She shook her head. “It strains even my rather generous credulity.”

  “No one said learnin’ was easy,” Nira replied.

  The two watched each other like beasts newly thrust onto the bloody sand of some unseen arena. Kegellen had the weight, the reach, but there was a gleeful violence in Nira’s eyes that gave the other woman pause. After a long time, Kegellen’s fan started moving again. She smiled.

  “Well, this is such a pleasure. I meet new people all the time, but find they so rarely surprise me.”

  “Oh, I’m fucking full a’ surprises.”

  “How delightful,” Kegellen purred. “And exciting. Maybe we could start with why you’ve asked me here.”

  Adare glanced over her shoulder at Intarra’s Spear, turned back to the other woman, then gestured to a chair. “Please have a seat. This will take a while to explain.”

  21

  “Look, Gwenna,” Jak said quietly, “I know you didn’t want me along for this.”

  She took a deep breath. As usual, she could smell his nerves, as though the skin had been flayed right off, leaving his raw flesh open to the salt air. She closed her eyes, hoping the darkness might blot out his anxiety, but she could still hear him picking at a ragged fingernail, the quick, convulsive motion a counterpoint to his shallow breathing, to his fast-beating heart. She opened her eyes again, staring up through the leaves of the mangroves at the low cumulus forming up to the southeast. Rain coming. Probably thunder, too. It would have been nice to bust out the long lens and get the scouting over with, but the morning sun was still too low in the east. Using the long lens now would be little better than flashing a mirror at Rallen’s hastily built fortress. There was nothing to do but lie still, wait for the sun to climb higher in the sky, and try to ignore the fear that seemed to twist Quick Jak a little tighter with every passing heartbeat.

  She considered falling asleep for a few hours. She’d been swimming and fighting almost every moment since the Widow’s Wish slipped beneath the waves, and she could feel her muscles getting heavier, her mind growing more muddled. There was no sleeping, however, with Jak a few feet away, gnawing his nails down to the bloody quick, and besides, if she didn’t say something to take his mind off the situation, he seemed likely to fall to pieces before they even started the swim back.

  Should have sent him with Talal, she thought. The leach knew how to talk to everyone, even a washout, but Talal was with Qora and Annick on a different craggy, bird-shit-stained rock a mile to the east, scouting Rallen’s fortress from a separate angle. Which left the talking to her. She took a deep breath.

  “It’s not personal,” she said, hoping that would be enough, that they could both just leave it at that and get some shut-eye.

  Instead she could hear Jak turning to face her. “I know what it is, Gwenna. You saw what happened back in Hook. You saw me freeze up in that fight.”

  “You weren’t even in the fight,” she replied, regretting the words even as she said them.

  She expected resentment or rage. When he spoke, however, she heard only resignation in his voice. “I know. It’s just … Never mind.”

  For a moment she lay still, her eyes closed. Never mind. It was a plausible break in the conversation, a reasonable end point. Maybe if she kept her mouth shut they could be done with all the chatter. Waves scraped over the stones a few paces away, soft, implacable fingers clawing at the shore.

  Never was much good at keeping my mouth shut, she thought, then rolled onto one elbow, blew out an exasperated breath, and turned to face the flier.

  “The thing is,” she said, unable to blunt her glare, “I do mind.”

  He didn’t turn away, but she could see him swallow quickly, heavily, as though holding her eyes required an effort of will. It was sad and it was fucking irritating. Quick Jak didn’t look like a coward; he looked just as much Kettral as anyone else on the Islands—more so than most, actually. The shaved head, the muscle laid in carved slabs over his chest and shoulders, the scars cut into his forearms by half a dozen training accidents … He sure looked the part, and the bastard could swim.

  It was two miles from the caves on Irsk to the craggy island of Skarn, where Rallen had built his fortress, two open miles unprotected by reef or shoreline, exposed to the huge swells rolling in off the ocean to the northeast. Kettral could make the swim easily, but then, Jak wasn’t Kettral. Gwenna had seen him freeze up back on Hook, and she had visions of hauling a panicked, thrashing washout through the waves all the way out and all the way back. She need not have worried. Jak’s stroke was so clean and languid it looked lazy. It was also strong as Hull and viciously efficient. Within a few hundred paces, Gwenna was working hard to keep up, gritting her teeth and measuring her breath while Jak sliced through the waves casually, only lifting his mouth to breathe every sixth stroke. Going out fast, she told herself. Trying to prove something. Halfway to Skarn, however, when Jak showed no sign of slowing, she was forced to admit that the pace, which seemed half a sprint to her, wasn’t even straining him. He might be a coward, but he was a fucking strong coward.

  She’d tried to keep up for a few hundred more strokes, battling her way up the steep green sides of the swells, straining to make the most of the downslope as the ocean slid beneath her. She wasn’t about to call out—not that he could hear her anyway—but finally he paused, turned back toward her, and treaded water while she caught up. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Tough passage,” he said. Gwenna could feel her jaw tightening, but there was no hint of smugness in his voice. No sign of triu
mph. “These crossed swells,” he said, nodding toward the northeast, “really slow things down.” He hesitated a moment, then pointed at the inflated bladder Gwenna had been dragging behind her. “I’m happy to pull that. If you want.”

  She was about to refuse. Jak had his own float bag filled with dry blacks, weapons, and a spyglass. Gwenna was used to hauling her own shit. She was about to snap something about not needing a washout to take care of her gear for her, but Jak continued before she could speak.

  “This is something I’m good at, at least,” he said quietly. “It’s a way I can actually help.”

  With an effort, she’d swallowed both her pride and her irritation. The flier might be a washout and a coward, but here he was all the same, in the middle of the ’Kent-kissing ocean, swimming toward a fort full of the same people who had been hunting him for months. That had to be worth something. Besides, something in his voice, some note she recognized but couldn’t quite name, stilled her objection. She’d been lost since leaving the Eyrie, baffled and utterly out of her depth. She knew what it was like to want, want desperately, some job that you understood, some task that you’d actually trained for. One of her most confident moments at the battle of Andt-Kyl had been diving beneath the logjam, lit starshatter in hand. She’d been certain she was going to die, had known it in her very marrow, but she’d also been certain that she could blow the bridge, that that one problem, at least, was something she could solve.

  “Thanks,” she grunted, loosening the knot around her waist, then handing him the bitter end of the cord. To her surprise, he’d smiled in the starlight.

  When they finally climbed clear of the water, out onto the barnacled rocks skirting a small atoll a few hundred paces west of Skarn, he hauled in the bag, untied the knot, passed it over to her without a word, and turned to his own gear, fishing out dry clothes. They’d made the swim over naked—no point struggling in soaked wool when you had a float bag to pull—and Gwenna snuck a glance at him while he was busy with his gear. He was breathing more deeply than he had at the start of the swim, the wings of the kettral inked across his back rising and falling with each breath. When he glanced over his shoulder at her, she realized she was staring, pulled her eyes away hastily, then cursed herself silently for the reaction. It wasn’t as though she’d never seen a man naked before. The tropics were hot, water was wet. The Kettral trained to swim in their blacks, of course, but most of the year it made more sense to swim with no clothes. Thigh-slapping cocks and bare asses were part of the job, just like the sight of blood was part of the job. And yet here she was peeking and blushing like a first-year cadet.

  She straightened up, ignoring her own nakedness, and studied the man openly.

  “Where you’d learn to swim like that?”

  He met her eyes, then looked away with a half shrug. “It was something to do. Over on Arim.”

  She frowned. “I thought they didn’t let you off the island.”

  “We can swim,” he said, pulling on his pants. “Could swim,” he said, cinching the belt tight as he corrected himself. “Up to five hundred paces offshore. I circled the island every day, once in the morning, once in the evening.”

  Gwenna stared. “That’s got to be what, ten miles a day?”

  He nodded. “A little less.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re not Kettral. It’s not like you’re going to need to fly missions. It’s not like people were going to die if you didn’t swim fast enough. What the fuck possessed you to spend half of every day grinding through garbage yardage in rings around Arim?”

  He stared at her. Dawn was just starting to bruise the eastern sky, but the night wind scudding in over the waves was still cool on her wet skin. A shiver ran through her.

  Finally he gave half a shrug. “It was something to do.” His voice was barely louder than the waves. “A way to forget about being locked up.”

  “If you didn’t want to be on Arim,” she said, the words pouring out of her before she could call them back, “then why did you quit?”

  He watched her a heartbeat longer, then shook his head, turning away without a word, pulling his blacks over his head. She could smell the shame on him, warm and cloying in the cool breeze, and after a moment she, too, turned away, shrugging into her own clothes, angry without knowing why.

  They took up a position in the verge of the scrubby mangroves just before dawn, settled into the vegetation, laid out the long lens, which Gwenna planned to use later, and the weapons, which she didn’t, then watched the sun rise without saying a word. She’d almost managed to forget about the conversation on the rocks, had almost bullied her squirming mind into something resembling sleep, and then he’d started up again with this shit about knowing that she didn’t want him along. Well, if he was determined to talk, she’d fucking talk.

  “You’re right,” she went on, more hotly than she’d intended. “I mind that you’re here, not because I don’t like you, but because I can’t rely on you.”

  “You don’t know anything about me, Gwenna.”

  “I know that you washed out during the Trial,” she said, holding up a finger. “I know that you froze in the alleyway over on Hook, that you were about to let your partner die because you were too scared to make a play.”

  “Two moments,” he replied quietly, “out of twenty-four years.”

  “The moments are all that matter, Jak. People talk about lifetimes, but lifetimes are built out of moments. The decisions we make, the ones that matter, the ones that get people killed or keep them alive…” She snapped her fingers. “They’re that fast.”

  The memory of that first Annurian legionary she’d killed flooded through her, hot and awful and undimmed even after nearly a year. How long had it taken to decide she needed to kill him, to decide how and then to do it, to plunge that ridiculous stick through his eye as thousands and thousands of Urghul roared all around her? A heartbeat. Maybe two.

  “It doesn’t matter what you do in between those moments,” she said, pressing ahead despite the hard wall of his silence. “It doesn’t matter if you swim all day, or if you’re kind to your aging mother, or any of the rest of that shit. What matters, when you’re Kettral, is what you do”—she stabbed a stiffened finger straight down into the stone—“right now. Right now. Right now.”

  He watched her a moment, then rolled onto his back, staring up through the leaves.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Of course I do. It’s why I’m not Kettral.”

  Gwenna had clenched her hands into fists. With an effort, she relaxed them, then let her head drop back against a root.

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s fine. Unless I’ve fucked up, and bad, we’re not going to be fighting anyone today. We’re just here to look at the birds, to learn what we can about what they’ve got and how we can take it.”

  That was why Jak had come in the first place. He knew about kettral, understood them better than anyone else left on the Islands. Gwenna could count the ’Kent-kissing things, could probably come up with a tally of the healthy and the badly injured, but that was about it. Before arriving at any plan worth the name, she’d need to know more: Which birds were the fastest? Which were the older and more experienced? If it came to a fight between the kettral, which were the strongest, the most likely to triumph?

  According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius with birds. Laith had said the man was the finest flier he’d ever seen, and Laith hadn’t thought anyone was a finer flier than Laith. Maybe it was true, and even if it wasn’t, Jak was what she had. Everyone could contribute something. That was the point of working in a team. The washout flier might still prove useful, even crucial. Gwenna just had to be careful to keep him out of a fight, to keep him well clear of any situation where he might lose his tenuous cool and get someone killed.

  By the time the sun finally climbed high enough to use the long lens without s
ignaling everyone on Rallen’s island, Jak had been quiet for hours, lying silently on his back, staring open-eyed into the thick-leaved canopy above. Gwenna had failed to fall asleep. Usually she could shut her eyes and be out in a few heartbeats. Certainly, the swim over had left her plenty tired. The morning’s conversation, though, had irritated her. She kept going over and over what Jak had said, trying to understand how someone with a strong body and keen mind could be so useless, so resigned to his failures. That she wanted to like him only made it worse. She felt betrayed without even knowing the man, and it was with a long sigh of relief that she finally rolled onto her stomach, extended the wooden tube of the long lens, and began the scouting she’d come to do.

  The main Eyrie compound—the command buildings, the barracks, the various training rings, the harbor, docks, and associated storehouses, the mess hall, Lucky Fucks’ Row—almost everything that mattered to the day-to-day operation of the Kettral was on Qarsh, miles to the southwest. Rallen, however, had opted to move his base of operations off the island. It wasn’t that hard to understand why. Qarsh was the largest island in the archipelago—nearly three miles across at the widest—and also the gentlest. Instead of crenellated limestone dropping straight into the sea, Qarsh had plenty of coves and beaches, mangrove stands and offshore reefs to break the worst of the swells. It was a great place to live but a nightmare to defend. Before the Eyrie ripped out its own guts, of course, defense hadn’t been much of an issue. Anyone attacking would be attacking from somewhere else, and the regular Kettral patrols could see them at least two days out.

  Rallen, however, was fighting a different sort of war. His enemies were already on the Qirins, hidden away in cellars on Hook, secreted in the tangles of jungle vines, lurking undiscovered in the endless warren of Hull’s Hole. And then there was the question of numbers. On the day Gwenna fled the Islands with Valyn and the Wing, there had been hundreds of active-duty Kettral, half as many cadets, and at least that many retired vets living out their last years down by the harbor—more than enough for the minimal guard duty required. If Manthe and Hobb were right, however, Rallen didn’t have more than thirty or forty soldiers at his disposal, not nearly enough to guard the whole perimeter of Qarsh.