The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Do they hurt?” the young woman asked, touching the corner of her own eye absently. Then, as though just now realizing what it meant to be confronted by those blazing irises, she let out a tiny cry, bowed her head, and dropped unsteadily to her knees. “Forgive me, Your Radiance,” she murmured to the bloodwood boards of Kegellen’s perfectly polished floor.

  Feeling sickened all over again, Adare crossed to the kneeling woman. “Please,” she said, extending a hand. “Rise. We are alone here, among friends; there is no need for this formality.”

  Mailly stared at the hand, but made no move to take it. After a long pause, she rose unsteadily to her feet, slowly, as though she were lifting a great weight on her shoulders, then stood swaying, pale, her breath feeble between her lips.

  She’s got a case of the Weeping Sleep, poor thing, Kegellen had explained before the girl arrived. She’s fought it for more than a year, but she’s losing now. Losing fast.

  “Please,” Adare said again, gesturing to the empty chair. “How can we make you more comfortable?”

  Mailly stared about her as though perplexed, then crossed to the chair, half sitting, half collapsing into it. When she finally looked back at Adare, she shook her head in disbelief.

  “It’s real,” she murmured. “The Emperor and everything … it’s all real.”

  Adare took a seat across the table, and Kegellen, after a murmured conversation with her servant, joined them as well. She had traded her white paper fan for a vermillion one, each of the wooden ribs stitched with fine gold thread. For a while, the only sound was its soft flutter.

  “So,” Adare began, choosing her words carefully. “I understand Kegellen has told you what … we need. And what I can offer in return.”

  The girl kept staring at her, her blue eyes wide as moons. The wrong color, Adare thought. Though it shouldn’t matter when this is done.

  “Mailly?” Adare asked.

  Mailly took a shuddering breath, as though she’d been jolted from some waking dream. “Will it hurt?”

  The simplicity of the question hit Adare like a slap. She had lived so long with misinformation, double meanings, and outright lies—her own and those of everyone around her—that it was easy to forget that some people just asked their questions, then believed the answers they were given. She felt a sudden knife-sharp desire to live in such a world, to cut away all the dizzying layers of her own schemes, to spend even a few days telling the naked truth, hearing it told.

  She started to say yes, half opened her mouth, then shut it again slowly.

  Do you love the truth enough, she wondered bleakly, to let it kill Sanlitun?

  If Adare was going to free Triste, she needed this girl. Mailly had agreed to the meeting, but if she knew what was coming, if she understood the full truth of it, she could still walk away. She would, probably.

  The sages and philosophers had a hundred metaphors for life: it was a path or a mountain, a voyage or a blooming flower, a harvest or a year with all the changing seasons. To Adare, however, life had always seemed like a simple series of trades. One woman could not have everything. She could sleep late only if she traded away the morning hours. Could trade an alliance with the Manjari for the goodwill of the Federated Cities. Trade a daughter’s vengeance for a unified empire. Some trades were trivial, some so vast it was impossible to truly grasp the stakes, but there was always a trade. Pretending otherwise was folly.

  When Adare didn’t speak, Mailly turned to Kegellen. “Will it hurt?” she asked again.

  The larger woman waved away the notion with her fan. “No. Of course not. A little sleepiness, a little trouble—”

  “Yes,” Adare said, cutting her off. “It will hurt horribly.”

  She prayed silently even as she spoke: Please, please, Lady of Light, please let her still agree. Please say I have not traded away a chance to save my son.

  Slowly, Mailly turned back to her, lip quivering. She tried to take a half sip of her water, but was trembling too badly to hold the glass.

  Kegellen pursed her lips. “Well. I suppose there may be some pain.”

  “First you will blister,” Adare said, forcing out the awful truth. “On your palms and all over your face. They will form quickly and painfully. Then they will burn until they break. Then they will bleed. So will your eyes and throat.”

  Mailly was openly shaking now. “Is there no other way?” she asked. “No easier way.”

  There were, of course. Of the dozens of poisons couched inside il Tornja’s lacquered box, ayamaya—the poison was named after the small Manjari spider from which it was extracted—was the worst. It was also the only one that would ravage the girl’s face badly enough to obscure the truth, to hide who she really was. There was no point in leaving a body in Triste’s cage if the guards could tell at a glance it wasn’t Triste.

  “No way that will work,” Adare replied.

  “It’s possible,” Kegellen suggested smoothly, “that your experience may be … more moderate than the Emperor suggests.”

  Adare shook her head again. She tried to imagine Mailly as an infant, but could see only Sanlitun’s tiny features, his wide burning eyes. “It will not be moderate, but it will be short.”

  “How long,” the girl asked, “from when I drink it until … until I die?”

  “Half a day. Maybe a little more or less.”

  “And my little brother?” Mailly asked. “My mother? You’ll take care of them? You’ll give them the money you promised?”

  Adare nodded. “I will.”

  “Because I won’t be there,” the girl said, shaking her head, scrubbing the tears from her cheeks. “To take care of them.”

  Kegellen stepped forward, placed a wide hand delicately on the girl’s shoulder. “Death is never easy, child, but you are already dying. We are offering you a way to provide for the people you love, even after Ananshael has taken you.”

  “But fifty golden suns?” Mailly said, hope and disbelief warring in her eyes. “Fifty whole suns?”

  The figure made Adare want to cry. Until that moment, she hadn’t known the details of the offer Kegellen had made to the girl. She had just assumed she would have the coin—even in wartime, even with Annur falling to pieces all around her—to meet the girl’s demands. A thousand suns, maybe? Five thousand? Vasta Dhati had required three fucking ships, after all. That the girl would sell herself for so little, that she should prize so highly fifty miserable suns—it seemed like a crime, somehow.

  “We can afford more,” Adare said.

  “Mailly and I have spoken already,” Kegellen interjected, “and agreed—”

  “Five thousand suns.”

  Mailly stared, her skepticism carved across her face.

  “Five thousand … For what? What do I have to do … for that?”

  She was shaking again, caught in the grip of some imagined horror too vast to comprehend.

  “Nothing more,” Adare replied. “Just this.”

  Kegellen looked over at Adare, raised her brows, opened her mouth as though to object, then thought better of it and shaped her lips into a smile.

  “Imagine your mother’s delight,” she purred. “Just think what this can do for your brother.”

  The woman sounded so sincere that Adare was genuinely surprised later, after Mailly had left, to find her shaking her head.

  “Five thousand suns,” Kegellen mused. She raised a beaded glass of Si’ite white to her lips, savored a sip, then set it down. “It strikes me as … excessive.”

  Adare stiffened. “It’s not your coin.”

  “No!” Kegellen said, laughing. “It’s most certainly not! Were it my coin, I would have bargained her down from fifty to twenty-five.”

  “You say that like you’re proud of it.”

  “Pride,” the woman replied, running her tongue over her lips. “It is a thing for women who have fought less hard than I have to survive.”

  Adare stared. “You’re just as rich as I am. Maybe more, for all I kn
ow.”

  “And not, I assure you, Your Radiance, as a result of giving away whole piles of gold to dying girls for … continuing to die.”

  “It’s for her family.”

  “I understand,” Kegellen said, nodding.

  “You told me yourself they’re desperately poor. That you pulled Mailly straight out of some tavern in the Perfumed Quarter.”

  “They are,” Kegellen said. “I did.”

  “Well, they can buy a mansion with five thousand suns. A small mansion with the slaves to take care of it.”

  “Another family in a mansion.” Kegellen raised her brows sardonically. “How wonderful. And, oh yes, more slaves. I’m sure that they will be delighted with the gift, Your Radiance. As will the slaves.”

  Adare felt raked over by her own amazement.

  “This is a mansion,” she said, stabbing a finger straight up at the chandelier. “It must be worth at least five thousand suns. And I’ve stumbled over a dozen slaves since the moment I came in.”

  Kegellen nodded. “It is a comfortable life I have carved out for myself.”

  “And you don’t think Mailly’s family deserves the same?”

  “I’ve found deserve to be an especially slippery word.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe it’s just that my old brain is too slow.”

  “Do you think you deserve all this?”

  Kegellen held her belly as she laughed, a long, rich sound. “Of course not. Everything I have, I stole!”

  “Well, Mailly’s family isn’t stealing anything. I’m giving it to them.”

  “Such largesse,” Kegellen murmured. “A truly imperial gesture.”

  Adare narrowed her eyes. “If you want to say something, say it.”

  “Forgive me, Your Radiance,” the woman said, spreading her hands in supplication, “I meant no offense.”

  “Oh, fuck the offense, Kegellen.”

  The Unkillable Bitch watched her over the rim of her wine flute, then nodded. “It is only this: you can pull Mailly’s mother out of the quarter, you can set her up as a merchant, a lady, a queen, but don’t delude yourself. All gold comes from somewhere.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The coin you’re so eager to give away was held by other hands before yours. For you to give it so freely, you had to seize it first.”

  24

  “It’s not a question of the plan,” Gwenna said, shaking her head. “The plan’s easy. We could come up with a dozen plans by the end of the night and still have time left over for drinking.”

  Talal frowned. “That might be overstating the case. Even without birds, Skarn is formidable. The cliffs alone—”

  “Oh, I know it’s fucking formidable, Talal,” she snapped, exasperation getting the better of her. “It’s not like I’m itching to spend an hour climbing ropes while my ass dangles in the wind. I’m just saying it’s doable. It would be doable, at least, if we had a couple Wings of Kettral on our side, rather than this happy band of cowards and fools.”

  That last bit came out louder than she’d intended, but the cowards and fools were also deaf, at least by the standards of anyone who’d drunk from a slarn egg. They were all at the far end of the cavern, clustered close to the fire, and aside from the usual glances—part curious, part worried—no one seemed to have heard her outburst. Except Manthe, Gwenna amended. The woman was staring at her, a roasted gull wing still clutched in her hand, forgotten. She’d been through the Trial, of course, she and Hobb both. If she’d been paying attention, she’d heard Gwenna’s estimation of her little rebellion, and she seemed always to be paying attention.

  Let her, Gwenna thought. There was no point tiptoeing around the basic fact: despite their various degrees of training, the washouts were a long way from being Kettral.

  “They’re not without skills,” Talal said quietly.

  “If you count cowering as a skill,” Gwenna replied. “After that very first act of defiance, which got them absolutely decimated, they’ve done nothing but skulk around and try not to die.”

  “Not dying is a good first step.”

  “But it’s not the only step. We came here to find out what in Hull’s name was going on, and to get some birds. Well, now we know what’s going on: Rallen, his yellowbloom trade, and his petty tyranny. Which means it’s time to get the birds. The trouble is, we need a better team if we’re going to have any kind of shot at it.”

  “No, we don’t,” Annick said.

  The sniper didn’t bother to look over; her eyes were trained on the two dozen men and women at the other end of the cave. They were all supposed to be working together, all on the same side, but Annick was watching them as if they were the enemy, as if she’d have to start putting arrows in eyeballs sometime in the next few heartbeats. At least she hadn’t bothered to draw her bow. That always made Manthe twitchy, and Gwenna didn’t need any more twitching out of the woman just at the moment.

  “We are the Kettral here,” Annick continued. “We’ll take care of the mission.”

  Not for the first time, Gwenna considered it. The sniper’s notion did have a certain appeal. After all, sheer numbers weren’t everything, especially when your numbers didn’t have any idea what in Hull’s name they were doing. In theory it was better to have more bodies on the battlefield than the other guy, but when Gwenna ran her eyes over the bodies available—some barely older than her, two or three stooped enough to be grandparents—she didn’t feel all that cheery about her prospects. A friend could put a blade in your back just as quickly as a foe, especially when the shit got thick. A fuckup on your own side could kill you just as dead as a stroke of tactical genius from the enemy.

  “I’d love to take care of it ourselves,” Gwenna replied finally, shaking her head, “but it won’t work. The plan needs more people.”

  “Then change the plan.”

  “It’s not that easy, Annick.”

  “Ease is irrelevant. Efficacy is what matters.”

  “Well, it won’t be very effective either,” Gwenna growled. “Not if the three of us go on our own.”

  Talal nodded slowly. “Even if we each took a bird—and when was the last time any of us flew a bird—we’d be easy targets for the pursuit. They’d have snipers down on the talons. We wouldn’t.”

  “So we don’t take the birds,” Annick said. “We go after Rallen and his soldiers instead.”

  Gwenna stared at the sniper. “Three of us against all of them?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because three versus thirty or forty makes for shitty odds.”

  “Didn’t slow us down with these,” Annick replied, jerking her chin at the figures moving around the far end of the cave. “Rallen’s troops aren’t Kettral either.”

  Gwenna hesitated. The sniper was right. Rallen himself was an overstuffed bag of suet, even if he was a leach. He had the numbers, but if the story the rebels told was true, the bastards doing Rallen’s fighting were culled from the same group of washouts as the semi-soldiers cowering in the cave.

  “They’re not the same,” Talal pointed out. “Rallen handpicked his people. Don’t forget, he was the Master of Cadets. He knows every single one. It’s not a coincidence that there are no leaches down here. Or barely any fliers. He knew who he wanted, who would fight for him, who would fight well. Worse than that, when it came time to start killing, he would have gone after his most dangerous opponents first. The best soldiers are either fighting for him, or they’re dead over on Qarsh. These are…” He hesitated, probably searching for a delicate phrase to mask the ugly truth. “The leftovers.”

  “That is my point,” Annick said, undeterred. “They have survived because of their incompetence, not in spite of it.” For the first time she glanced over at Gwenna, blue eyes glacial. “And now you want to fight alongside them.”

  Gwenna started to respond, then stopped herself. It was sound thinking, all of it—Talal’s analysis and Annick’s objections. When she first set sail for the Islands, there had been no g
uarantee that she’d find anyone at all, certainly not anyone sympathetic to her own goals. She’d expected, from that first meeting with Kaden, that her own Wing would have to go it alone, that they’d have to find a way to face down whatever waited on the Islands with no help, no backup.

  So what’s the problem? she growled at herself.

  The problem, once she’d wrestled it into a spot where she could get a good clear look at it, was simple: her goals had grown. When she wasn’t paying attention—maybe when she was hauling her way through the waves, or lying in wait beneath the mangroves—she’d gone from wanting to find one bird and bring it out, to wanting something … larger. The Eyrie was destroyed, had destroyed itself, but the fact that there were still seven birds on the Islands, the fact that there were still Kettral-trained women and men holed up in a cave and willing to fight—it meant the Kettral weren’t finished. Not fully. Not yet.

  “They’re the only choice,” Gwenna said. “If we want the best shot at Rallen, we need more bodies.” She paused, hunting for the words. “And after that, too…”

  Talal watched her, his dark eyes grave. “We can’t turn them into something they’re not, Gwenna,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied, chewing her lip. “I know.”

  “They failed,” Annick said flatly. “They are failures.”

  Gwenna shook her head, remembering Quick Jak’s relentless endurance on the long swim from Irsk to Skarn, remembering Qora’s stupid courage as she stood alone at the top of a flight of stone steps to face down Rallan’s Black Guard.

  “I’m just not ready to believe that the one thing means the other.”

  * * *

  After the first three days trying to train some competence into the ragtag rebel band, Gwenna was starting to wonder if Annick hadn’t been right all along. She’d gone into the task with a degree of optimism. Everyone hiding in the Hole had at least some training, and a handful, an entire Wing’s worth, had made it all the way to the Trial before washing out. In theory, those few had just as much training as Gwenna herself.

  The problem was, most of them were years, even decades past that training. Quick Jak was on the younger side, and he was six years older than Gwenna. Half the crew looked to be in their fourth decade, and one woman, Delka, must have been edging up on her fifties. She looked fit enough—evidently she enjoyed running laps around Arim’s gentle coastline—but she hadn’t held a bow or a blade in better than thirty years. Kettral instructors might have been able to polish the rust off all those half-forgotten skills, but the Kettral instructors were all dead, and so Gwenna found herself facing the woman, trying to keep her temper in check, to hide her desperation, as they worked through the basic shit all over again.