The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  A murmur of shock, of disbelief ran around the circle.

  “Tell them, Manthe,” Gwenna said.

  The woman backed away, shaking her head, out of the firelight and into the darkness. “This is madness. I’ll have no part of it.”

  Talal stepped forward instead. The ugly seam down his arm had already clotted and begun to scab over. He held it up to the firelight, where everyone could see, then ran a finger along the damaged flesh. “It’s true,” he said simply. “I took this wound barely an hour ago. We are asking you to believe a shocking thing, but we can offer our own bodies as testament to the truth.”

  As usual, Gwenna marveled at the steadiness in his voice, the grave, quiet confidence in those dark eyes. If I had any brains, she thought, I’d let him do all the talking. I’d only open my mouth when we really needed to piss someone off.

  The fear-stink still rolled off the assembled soldiers, but there was something else there, too, a smell she couldn’t quite place: awe, maybe, or hope.

  Then Jak started up again. “I know that you’re telling the truth,” the flier said quietly. “It’s what they told us at my own Trial. But we could die down there.”

  And just like that, it was impossible to keep quiet.

  “You could die just about anywhere,” Gwenna snapped. “You could die right here in this cavern. The fire could go out and the slarn could come. Rallen could smoke you out or starve you out. You could eat a hunk of rancid gull meat and die curled up on the floor shitting out your own guts.”

  Strangely, suddenly, she thought of Pyrre, of the woman’s casual indifference to her own inevitable doom. For the first time, it actually seemed sensible, enviable. Maybe it was even beautiful to live so close to the ugly fact of death and yet to feel so little fear. Gwenna racked her mind for what Pyrre might say to these terrified soldiers. Probably nothing. She’d probably just laugh at the lot of them and walk off.

  She took a deep breath, gathered her calm, tried all over again to sound reasonable. “The thing is—” she began.

  Hobb cut her off. “The thing is, these people aren’t Kettral.” Manthe still trembled in the far shadows, her back pressed against the rock wall. Her husband, however, had approached the group while Gwenna was haranguing Jak. He stood just beyond the circle now, thick arms crossed over his chest, surveying the washouts scornfully. “They’re not ready for the Trial. They might never be ready. I told you this before.”

  Gwenna turned to face the man. The slarn thrashed on the floor between them, but she stepped forward anyway, straight over the flailing beast, taking the straightest line toward the other Kettral. The other soldiers, sensing the danger, parted to give her room. Hobb didn’t step back, but he dropped a hand to the handle of the sword at his waist. Gwenna didn’t bother with her own sword, flicking free her belt knife instead when she was a pace and a half away.

  To his credit, Hobb was just as quick with his own weapon, but a sword is longer than a knife, and takes longer to draw. Just as he pulled it clear of the sheath, Gwenna slammed it aside, stepped into the gap, and laid her knife’s edge against his throat. “You did tell me before,” she said. “I remember. You told me they weren’t ready. And I told you they are. They trained as Kettral, every single one of them. When Rallen came with his second chance, they stepped forward to take it. When Rallen played his cards and started his killing, these people were the ones who fought back, who resisted, and who got away.”

  Hobb started to respond, eyes wide with rage, but Gwenna pressed her knife deeper into his neck.

  “And it wasn’t because of you and your fucking wife, whatever you told them. They’re not alive because of you. They are alive because they are strong. Because they are survivors. What you have helped them to do is hide. You’ve convinced them to quit hunting and allowed them to become hunted. They are fucking losing because of you. And so if I hear another word about how they’re not ready, how they’re not Kettral, how they can’t do what they need to do, I am going to cut your throat, and then I’m going to cut your wife’s throat, and I am going to feed both your useless, cowardly carcasses to the slarn.”

  If Hobb was frightened of the knife at his neck, he didn’t show it. Instead, his lip curled up in a sneer. “You fool,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “You little fool.”

  Gwenna met the man’s furious eyes, wondering if she was going to have to make good on her threat, but before she could respond, Qora spoke from behind her, the woman’s voice quiet but clear above the sounds of the slarn scraping against the floor, the crackling and shifting of the fire. “I’ll do it.”

  Gwenna didn’t turn. She kept her knife on Hobb’s throat, ready to open it if he twitched. Hobb’s eyes, however, moved past her, toward the washouts gathered around the slarn.

  “Listen to this, and listen good,” he spat. “The fact that one bitch barely past her own Trial tells you you’re good doesn’t make you good. I flew missions with the Kettral for more than a decade, with real Kettral, and I’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear: you’re not Kettral. You’re slower. You’re weaker. You’re dumber. And if you follow her,” he raised his chin toward Gwenna without bothering to look at her, “Jakob Rallen is going to cut you to ribbons.”

  Again, it was Qora who replied. “Then I’ll die fighting. That’s what Kettral do, right? They die fighting, not hiding.”

  For once, Gwenna managed to keep her own mouth shut. She waited for Hobb’s eyes to return to her, then she just smiled. The man spat past her, onto the stone, then turned, indifferent to the small slice her knife left on his throat, stalking back to the far end of the cavern where his wife waited in the shadows. Manthe hissed something urgent and desperate when he reached her—all Gwenna could make out was … careful … and … my love … and then Hobb wrapped a brusque hand around her shoulders, ignoring Gwenna and the rest as though they’d ceased to exist.

  Gwenna exhaled slowly, sheathed her knife. When she turned, Qora had already taken a step into the human circle, a step toward the thrashing slarn.

  “I’ll do it,” she said again. Then, before anyone could respond, as though dragged forward by her own fear, she darted the last few paces, baring her arm to the creature. Gwenna watched as the slarn, scenting flesh, twisted in its bonds, then brought those jaws to bear. Startled by the movement, Qora jerked back with a shout. She was fast, but not fast enough. The beast snagged two fingers on her left hand, severing them at the second joint, shrieking that high, hair-raising shriek just at the edge of hearing. Qora straightened, staring half in shock at the blood welling from the stumps of her fingers, then pulled back.

  Gwenna swallowed her curse, and crossed to her. It wasn’t a bad wound—clean, tendon neatly severed, no crushed bone—but it was a wound, all the same, worse than required for the Trial, and it was bleeding badly. The others had gone abruptly silent, as though the horror was lodged in their throats. Gwenna could smell the fear, hot and rotten. They were ready to break.

  “Look,” she said, seizing Qora by the wrist, pressing down on the artery even as she held the woman’s hand in the air for the others to see. “This is what you’re afraid of.”

  “Her fingers…,” someone gasped.

  “I know,” Gwenna replied. “It got two of her fingers.” She looked slowly from one to the next, pronouncing the next words as clearly as she could. “So what?”

  They gaped at her, unable to parse the question.

  “So what?” Gwenna said again. She could hear Talal moving behind her, stirring at the fire for some reason. She ignored him, turning to Qora instead.

  “You can still stand, right?”

  The woman nodded shakily.

  “And you can talk?”

  Another nod.

  “Let them hear you talk.”

  After a long pause, Qora ground out the words between gritted teeth. “I want to gut that fucking thing.”

  Gwenna smiled.

  “Hear that? Not only can she walk and talk, she wants to fi
ght. You’re all frightened. I understand that, but I want you to look at this, and to keep looking until you understand.” She gave Qora’s mangled hand a little shake. “This is what you’re afraid of and it is nothing. Am I right, Qora?”

  Please, Hull, she prayed silently, let me be right.

  Qora licked her lips, then, after a moment, she nodded.

  “We need to cauterize it,” Talal said quietly. The leach had come up behind Gwenna’s shoulder. He held a red-hot belt knife in his hand. Gwenna grimaced. Qora had shown some grit so far, but the burning was going to hurt a lot more than the original wound. To her shock, however, Qora looked over at Talal, met his eyes, then nodded. “I’ll do it myself.”

  Talal started to object. “It’ll be—”

  “She’ll do it,” Gwenna said. “She’s earned it.”

  And they need to see this.

  Talal hesitated, then handed the woman the knife. Qora stared at the glowing steel as though it were a snake. Then, with a bellow of defiance, pressed it against her ravaged flesh. Blood hissed, bubbled. The stench of seared meat filled the air, and after a moment she dropped the knife, sagging to one knee. Then slowly, painfully, she stood again.

  “All right,” she said quietly, meeting Gwenna’s eyes. For once there was no bluster in her voice, no anger. “I did it. Now what?”

  Gwenna nodded, clapped the woman on the shoulder. The extra stiffness in Qora’s spine, the proud tilt of her chin—it was worth a couple fingers. Gwenna studied the other washouts, pausing on Jak. The flier’s face had gone pale as the slarn’s belly. Qora might have found resolve in her wound, but clearly the sight had only sickened the flier further.

  “I go down now?” Qora asked. “Go looking for the egg?”

  Gwenna shook her head. “No. You don’t go in alone.”

  “That’s the way they did it during my Trial,” Jak said. “One at a time.”

  “Yeah,” Gwenna said. “We got that shit, too. And it was stupid. You’re going to fight as a Wing, you’re going to die, if it comes to dying, as a Wing. I figure you can do this, too, as a Wing. Now … who’s going to join Qora?”

  There was no sound but the fire and the hammering heartbeats of two dozen washouts. Gwenna looked from face to stricken face, hauled in a deep breath, trying to catch a whiff of the resolve, or anger, or courage they so desperately needed. No one moved. No one met her eyes.

  I was wrong, she thought bleakly. I played it all wrong.

  From the far end of the cavern came Hobb’s low, derisive laugh. “I told you,” he growled. “They’re not ready.”

  Gwenna considered killing the man. It wouldn’t fix any of the washouts, but it would feel good to tackle a problem she knew how to solve. She couldn’t fix cowardice, couldn’t fix a lifetime of failures, couldn’t find the right words to forge pig iron into true steel. She could, however, face a live man with a sword in his hand and make him dead. That, at least, was something she understood.

  Before she’d moved, however, Delka stepped forward quietly.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  Gwenna turned to stare at her, this woman in her early fifties, her hair more gray than brown, the wrinkles deep around her eyes, dark skin spotted from long days in the sun. She smelled frightened, but she didn’t flinch as she rolled up her sleeve, baring her arm for the slarn. She studied the monster for a moment, then met Gwenna’s eyes, and, shockingly, she smiled.

  “I’m ready,” she said again. “I’ve been getting ready for this a long, long time.”

  * * *

  In the end, amazingly, they all stepped forward. All but Quick Jak, who stood trembling like an autumn leaf, eyes fixed on the blood-spattered stone. Most of the rebels were already below, hunting in groups of four or five for the slarn eggs that would save them. Three of the bitten soldiers stood at the gaping mouth of the tunnel, clutching their fresh wounds, waiting impatiently for Jak to step up, bare his pale skin for the writhing slarn, then join them. Jak, however, was not stepping up.

  “It’s time,” Gwenna said, trying to balance her voice on the narrow edge between encouragement and scorn. “Your turn, Jak.”

  He didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to hear her. Instead he watched the slarn, staring at that hideous, eyeless face, his own eyes pried wide with the horror, helpless as a mouse caught in the snake’s cold gaze. He’d watched the others, watched every one of them as they stepped up to be savaged by the creature. Gwenna had taken that for a good sign; he hadn’t looked away, hadn’t even flinched, really. Now she wasn’t so sure. That stare of his seemed locked to his face. He wasn’t looking because he wanted to; he was looking because his fear compelled him.

  “Jak,” she said, crossing the rough stone floor to grab him by the jerkin. “It’s time.”

  She had to shake him to break his gaze, to get him to look at her instead of the blood-soaked slarn. When he did, she knew that it was hopeless. The terror had him, had him utterly. It was seared into his eyes. She could smell it, thick in his fetid sweat. She could hear it in his rapid breathing, shallow and far too fast as it rasped between bared teeth, chapped lips. He wasn’t going to do it, couldn’t do it. In another circumstance, she would have let him go, would have shoved him away, indulged briefly in her own pity and disgust for the failure of a man who could have been a soldier, then let it go.

  But we need him, she thought. Hull help us all, we need him.

  There were two other fliers in the group: Delka and a fat, ginger-haired idiot named Corantan. The fight against Rallen, when it came, might well rest in large part on the birds and the people flying them.

  And so you want a coward in the mix, a busted-up excuse for a man who lets his panic paralyze him?

  She didn’t, but then, wanting didn’t much come into the question. According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius when you put him on a bird’s back. He’d made it all the way through training, after all, made it all the way to the Trial. Despite his current paralysis, he couldn’t be a complete fuckup. She needed him in the battle against Rallen, needed someone to wrangle the Dawn King, to make the best use of the fastest, most powerful bird, and after that … Gwenna had tried to put the thought out of her head, but the truth was there, bald, ugly, and undeniable: after Laith’s death, her own Wing needed another flier. Delka might be all right, but Delka seemed too old, too soft, too gentle.

  Gwenna just couldn’t get out of her mind the memory of Jak swimming the midnight swells, that strong, efficient, almost effortless stroke, the way he wasn’t even breathing hard when he climbed out of the ocean and shook off the last of the spray. He could be so good.… It was like finding a beautiful blade, perfectly balanced but gone to rust on the surface. You didn’t throw away a blade like that. You got a stone and you scoured it clean.

  “It’s time,” she said again.

  He looked at her, then dropped his eyes. She could almost taste his shame, sick-sweet in the back of her mouth. Those strong shoulders slumped forward as he shook his head.

  “I can’t, Gwenna. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t care what happened then, and I don’t care how sorry you are, you need to do this. Your friends need you to do it.” She almost admitted that she needed him to do it, but stopped herself. “Let’s go,” she said instead.

  “I can’t,” he insisted, his voice quiet but horribly tight. Anger roughened those syllables now, and he jerked away from her hand on his shoulder. “Just leave it, all right?”

  “No,” Gwenna said. “It is not all right, and I won’t leave it.”

  “Gwenna,” Talal said. The leach stood a few paces away, his arms crossed over his chest, dark eyes grave.

  “Don’t interfere,” she snapped.

  “Hull’s Trial is a voluntary crucible,” Talal continued. “To make it anything else is to turn it into a sort of torture.”

  “Do you see me forcing him?” she demanded, holding her hands up.

  Over by the tunnel mouth lea
ding down into the dark, the others watched them, urgency and reluctance warring on their faces. Gwenna could remember what they felt, the slow, mesmerizing burn of the poison gnawing its way up through the flesh, up, up, up, like some awful, mindless acid stupidly seeking the heart.

  “Every heartbeat you delay,” she said, leaning in so close that Jak couldn’t avoid her face, “is killing your Wing.”

  “They’re not my Wing.”

  “They are until this Trial is over,” Gwenna spat. “And you are letting them down.”

  His explosion happened instantly and without warning. One moment he was hanging his head, shame and terror steaming off of him. The next, he’d seized her by the shoulders, was screaming into her face, his lips drawn back in a rabid rictus, his spittle hitting her in the face.

  “That’s why I’m not going to do it, Gwenna! I’m not Kettral. I’ve never been Kettral. I was good with the birds and that was it! And if you think I’m letting someone down now, wait until it comes to a real fight. You saw what happened back on Hook, but you don’t understand. It’s like that every fucking time. I don’t want it to be that way. I hate it. I hate it. But I can’t help it, Gwenna. The fear, it just … gets me. It’s like a claw closed tight around my heart, and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, all I can think about is getting out. Getting safe! If this was something I could cut out of myself with a knife,” he said, dropping her shoulders to bare his chest, as though exposing some treacherous organ, “I would start cutting. I would carve it out if it killed me. But it’s not.” He shook his head, and finally his voice subsided. “It’s been there all my life, since I was a tiny boy. This fear is part of every memory I have.”

  “I don’t accept that,” Gwenna said finally.

  “It doesn’t matter if you accept it,” he said. “It’s real. It’s an ugly, disgusting fact, but it’s a fact.”