The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Adare studied the girl. The drug had started to reassert its hold. The answers were coming faster now, pouring out of her, the words slightly slurred. If she was lying, she was a brilliant liar, every bit as good as il Tornja. It seemed unlikely, and yet what was the alternative? If Triste was telling the truth, she was just a whore, a piece to be used and thrown away. But why would il Tornja risk so much on a single worthless stone? There was something more, something Adare still wasn’t seeing.

  “What about your family?” she asked, coming at the question from a different angle. “Where are they?”

  The girl nodded dully. “My mother’s name was Louette Morjeta. A leina in Ciena’s temple.”

  “Was?”

  Triste waved a hand as though to clear the air of smoke. “She’s dead.”

  For a moment, it seemed that there were tears in her eyes. It was hard to tell in the shifting lamplight. Triste blinked once, twice, and they were gone.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Kaden claims she killed herself. After … the Jasmine Court.”

  Adare narrowed her eyes. “Claimed? It doesn’t sound like you believe him.”

  Triste shrugged. The motion was sluggish, reluctant. “I was in prison by the time it happened. She might have. She had enough reason to, I guess.”

  “What reason?”

  “Selling me to my father. Betraying the Emperor. Learning her daughter was a leach and a murderer. Take your pick.”

  “Who was your father?”

  Triste coughed up a mangled laugh. “Kaden didn’t tell you?”

  Adare’s heart beat a little faster. “Tell me what?”

  “Holy Hull,” the girl said, shaking her head. “Sweet Intarra’s light, have you even talked to Kaden since you returned?”

  “We spoke,” Adare replied warily.

  “So he doesn’t trust you. Even though you’re back, he’s not telling you things.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Triste met her gaze. Though her eyes were vague with drug, there was no compromise in them. “Or what? You’ll beat me until I do?”

  Adare wanted to hit the girl, to stand up, lean across the table, slap her across the face, and growl that she, Adare, was the only one in the whole fucking capital willing to help. Kaden locked you away, she wanted to say, and then vanished. The council wants you tried and killed. Il Tornja wants you killed without a trial. In all Annur, I am the only one willing to help you.

  Instead, she took a deep breath, then another, keeping her mouth shut until she had shackled her anger.

  “The question,” she said finally, planing the edges from her voice until it was perfectly level, perfectly smooth, “is not about my relationship with Kaden. It is about my relationship with you. My brother locked you up. I set you free. I thought that might have earned me a measure of trust.”

  “Freedom,” Triste said, tipping over the cracked glass in front of her. It rang against the table like a bell. A few final drops drained from its rim as it swung across the bloodwood in a lazy arc. “How wonderful.”

  “I will tell you something,” Adare said, deciding in that moment to try the truth. “You were right. Il Tornja wants you dead. He took my son, threatened him with harm if I failed to kill you in your prison.”

  For the first time, the leach’s eyes widened.

  So, Adare thought. Chalk up one point for the truth.

  “You have a child?” Triste asked.

  Adare nodded. It was hardly a secret. Even if it had been, there was no calling it back now. “His name is Sanlitun, after his grandfather.”

  “His grandfather,” Triste said, shaking her head sadly.

  Adare stared, trying to parse the sudden change in the girl’s mood. “My father,” she clarified, as though anyone in Annur could be ignorant of the late Emperor’s name.

  “Your father,” Triste said, nodding slowly, almost drunkenly, “who was related to my father.”

  Adare opened her mouth, but found she had nothing to say.

  Triste, seeing her shock, just nodded again. “Tarik Adiv wore that blindfold all his life because beneath it, he had eyes…” She trailed off, gesturing vaguely toward Adare’s face. “… just like yours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Kaden told me. He found out the truth, and then he killed him, killed my father.”

  “How do you know it was the truth?” Adare demanded, her mind racing to deny the claim. “How do you know Kaden wasn’t lying?”

  “It just fit,” Triste said, head lolling to the side, “with everything. Besides, why would Kaden lie about that? What would he get out of it?”

  “It’s not what he would get,” Adare said slowly. “It’s what he could keep me from having. Holy Hull,” she breathed, something like a pattern falling finally into place.

  The Malkeenian claim to preeminence rested on divine blood, blood claimed by every emperor since Terial himself. The Malkeenians were the lineage of Intarra; their burning irises blazed with that undeniable proof. The difficult thing about lineage, however, was the fact that it forked. Every dynastic chronicle Adare had ever encountered involved rival cousins and brothers, far-flung relatives returned from exile or obscurity to make their own claim to one throne or another.

  Annur had been spared such trials by the blazing eyes. The Malkeenians produced as many brothers and bastards as any other royal family, but none had the burning irises. There were gray-eyed offshoots and brown-irised by-blows scattered across two continents, maybe farther, men and women who might also trace their ancestry back to Intarra, but the burning eyes, that unmistakable gaze of fire, that, it seemed, was reserved for the purest stock, for the true inheritors of the blessing of the goddess.

  There were stories, of course, outlandish tales of men and women far flung from the capital itself, whose eyes also burned. As a child, Adare had devoured those tales with a mixture of horror and fascination. On the one hand, any ramification of Intarra’s blessing would make her own family’s claim a lie; on the other, Adare liked to imagine another child like herself, a girl her own age raised in Mireia, or Sarai Pol, or Mo’ir; not a sister, exactly, but a cousin, another person who understood what it was like to live with those irises. Adare had spent days imagining the friendship growing between them. Valyn and Kaden had each other. Why shouldn’t she have a companion, too, someone to share her own worries and delights?

  She had put the question to her father once, asking if he could send imperial messengers to search for the almost-sister she’d grown certain that she had. Sanlitun shook his head. “If another child had the eyes, we would know. That is the nature of the blessing. It is not something one can hide.”

  “But the stories,” Adare had protested.

  “Are stories,” he said. “Tales people tell, that they cultivate in their own boredom or confusion. There are always such stories—hidden princes, lost kings, princesses raised as swineherds. They are rarely tethered to the truth.”

  “So there are no other branches of our family?”

  “There are branches,” he replied soberly. “But we are the only Malkeenians.”

  So ended Adare’s hope of a long-lost cousin. She had put the notion away like an outgrown childhood toy, and focused in earnest on her education, on whatever training her father could give her. And now this.

  “Another line of the family,” Adare said slowly, studying the girl across from her. Triste looked nothing at all like the distant cousin she had imagined as a child, nothing at all like Adare herself, but then, why would she? Adare and Valyn barely resembled each other, and they shared the same parents. “Could that be why il Tornja wants you dead?”

  Triste stared at her a moment, then looked away. Adare waited, but the girl remained silent, that glazed gaze of hers cold as a fortress wall.

  “You understand,” Adare said finally, “that I’m trying to help you.”

  “You’re trying to help yourself,” Triste replied, still not looking at he
r. “And you think I might be a useful tool. I’m through with that. Through being someone else’s tool.”

  No, Adare concluded, still chewing on her earlier hunch. That’s not it. It’s not about succession.

  Even if Tarik Adiv had possessed Intarra’s eyes, Triste did not. The Mizran Councillor was dead, and his orphaned daughter was a leach with violet eyes and no allies. She hardly posed any threat to Adare or il Tornja. Which meant the kenarang wanted her for some other reason.

  “What does it feel like?” Triste asked, reaching out unexpectedly to touch the scars on Adare’s arm. Her motion was slow, deliberate, in the age-old manner of the very drunk. She ran a cool finger over the crimson whorls, then pulled away. “What does it feel like to be loved by a goddess? To be chosen?”

  The words were quiet, but the girl’s question burned, as though it mattered more than anything else she’d said since her escape. Adare pulled her hand back, half burying it in the sleeve of her robe. Prophets were supposed to be bold, unflinching in their faith. It was a role she’d been trying to play for months now, in front of the Sons of Flame and the Army of the North, in front of Lehav, and Kaden, and the council. She’d hit on a set of platitudes that seemed to satisfy most audiences, a brief statement of conviction thick with terms like blessing and sacred trust, divine right and responsibility. For a moment she started to trot it all out again; then she stopped herself. The only thing Triste had responded to so far was the truth, and so she gave her the truth.

  “It’s baffling. Half the time I don’t believe it’s even real.”

  Triste’s face twisted into the echo of a smile. Adare watched her, waiting for more, but nothing more came. She just closed her eyes, as though she were too weary to go on. Adare forced down her frustration, trying to come at the question from a different angle.

  “I understand,” she began slowly, “that you don’t want to be a tool. You were eager enough to help my brother, however, when you came back to the city. You were willing enough to help him break into the Dawn Palace.”

  Adare wasn’t sure what she expected in response—quiet defiance, maybe, or more of the same drugged lassitude. When Triste’s lids flicked open, rage burned in her eyes.

  “I didn’t even know we were going to the Dawn Palace.”

  “You must have. You killed all those people for him.”

  “I didn’t do it for him.”

  Her lips curled, baring her perfect teeth, and Adare leaned back in her chair, her own body quick to put distance between them even as her mind scrambled to stay balanced on the shifting conversation.

  “Then why? Why murder a hundred people you didn’t even know?”

  Triste shook her head, but her only response was a sort of dying growl deep in her throat.

  “If you didn’t do it for Kaden,” Adare pressed, “who did you do it for?”

  “No,” Triste replied finally, drawing out the syllable, shaking her head warily from side to side. “No.”

  Adare gritted her teeth. The answer was there, an answer at least. She could sense it the way she could sense the coming dawn sometimes, even when the sky was still flat black. Somewhere in the mess of words, tangled up among all those intertwining facts, lay il Tornja’s reason for wanting the girl dead, a reason that might also be a weapon, something Adare could use to fight the Csestriim general, something she might use to save her son.

  “I’m done,” Triste said, planting her palms firmly on the table before her.

  “What do you mean, done?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  “You stupid, stubborn fool,” Adare spat. “Kaden put you in prison. Il Tornja wants you dead. I’m the one who freed you. Why do you want to help them and thwart me?”

  “I don’t want to help anyone,” Triste said, her voice dry as ash. “Certainly not you.”

  Adare blew out a long, exhausted breath. “If you’re right about your father, then we’re family. Very distant family, but family.”

  “Family?” Triste stared at her. “What does family mean to you? Kaden is your brother, and the two of you have been trying to kill each other for a year.”

  “Kaden betrayed Annur. He did everything he could to destroy it. You and I…” She studied the girl, that perfect face etched with scar. “We could be allies.”

  “No, we couldn’t. To have allies, you need equals, and an emperor doesn’t have equals.”

  Adare started to respond, to point out that the world was filled with asymmetrical alliances—empires allied with independent city-states, kings with aristocrats, warlords with the peasantry they protected—then stopped herself. Whatever Triste cared about, whatever her reasons for refusing Adare’s overtures of peace, they weren’t likely to be altered through some academic discussion of power structures. The problem was the chasm of distrust running between them, a rocky gap that the trusses of logic would always be too weak to bridge.

  “Fine,” Adare said. “If you don’t want to talk today, we’ll stop.”

  “You expect tomorrow to be different?”

  “I don’t expect anything,” Adare replied. “But I know what I need, and I’m willing to take the time necessary to get it.”

  It was partly true, at least. The jailors would have already found Mailly dead inside her cell. With any luck they would take the body for Triste. They would be confused, no doubt, at how the girl had contracted such an awful disease inside her cell, but there were half a dozen possible, if unlikely, vectors—bird shit piled high in the corners of the cages, contamination of the food.… There would be an investigation. They would cut the poor girl’s body apart searching for the cause, but they would be looking in the wrong place, looking inside, and each cut they made in Mailly’s skin would only obscure the truth.

  As far as anyone knew, Triste was dead, and Adare planned to report as much to il Tornja. She hardly expected him to return Sanlitun—he had played his hand, and there was no unplaying it now—but the lie would buy her time.

  “Whatever you believe,” Adare said finally, “I’m not your enemy.”

  Triste’s laugh was light, bitter. “Then let me go.”

  “No. There is something about you, something dangerous to il Tornja. If I intend to fight him, I need to know what it is.”

  “Fight him…,” Triste said quietly. For just a moment, for a heartbeat or two, something bloomed in her eyes, and the lines of her face softened. She looked years younger. Younger and lost and almost hopeful. Then she blinked, shuddered, and her face slammed shut.

  “I hope you fight him,” she said, enunciating carefully.

  “I intend to—” Adare began.

  The girl cut her off. “I hope you fight him, and he fights back. I’ll still be locked up somewhere, but I hope I hear about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About his death,” Triste said, violet eyes ablaze. “And Kaden’s. And yours. About your son’s. That’s the only way this ends. You know it, but you’re too stubborn to believe it. All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down, and though I don’t pray often, when I do pray, I pray for this: that I get to hear how it all happened.”

  30

  Gray deepened into green as the eastern sky brightened with the watery light of the still-unrisen sun. Unseen frogs along the river’s bank began their monophonic chorus. Fish rose to the water’s surface, took flies, then disappeared, the silent ripples of their passage growing, spreading, fading. Kaden could make out flashes of color between the trees and vines—red and cerulean, sky-white and green—bright-plumed birds swooping down from their night’s roost.

  A part of his mind—the part that remained unmoved by Kiel’s sudden arrival and dire news—catalogued the creatures, their songs and cries. The life of the jungle was so different from the life of the Bone Mountains—bolder, louder—but it was life all the same, millions of creatures moving through the stations of hunger and fear, lust and confusion, pleasure and pain.

  “It will al
l go away,” Long Fist said, as though reading his thoughts, “if my consort’s host is killed.”

  “Triste is not Ciena’s host,” Kaden replied without looking up from the river. “She didn’t invite the goddess into her mind. She doesn’t want her there.”

  “The girl’s invitations and desires are irrelevant. The world you know is fragile as glass. Her death will shatter it.”

  Kaden turned to study the man. They sat—Long Fist, Kiel, and Kaden himself—on a large boulder at the river’s edge. Dawn Rock, the local tribes called it, for the fact that it was there, from the top of the rock, looking east down the river’s course, that you could first see the morning sun. Kaden would have preferred to be already on the way back to the kenta, but Long Fist’s hieratic duties required him to be at the river just before dawn, to spill the blood of a small, black-haired monkey down the stone and into the swirling current as the sun rose. Unlike the sacrifice of the night before, this was a private ceremony, but a necessary one, evidently, and so the three of them sat on the rock as wide-mouthed fish rose for blood from the river’s unseen bottom, and the morning’s hot light ignited the white mist.

  “Triste is not dead yet,” Kiel said. “She is simply missing. Gone from the dungeon.”

  The Csestriim had arrived unexpectedly late the night before, escorted into the jungle camp by a pair of wary Ishien, just as Kaden had been.

  Kaden shook his head. “The dungeon was the last thing keeping her safe.”

  The Csestriim nodded. “She is at greater risk now. Grave risk.”

  Whatever that risk, Kiel’s voice was calm. He seemed indifferent to Triste’s fate or that of the goddess trapped inside her. The girl’s disappearance was a fact, no more or less than the other myriad facts of the world. Like Long Fist, Kiel sat cross-legged, gazing down into the current, but unlike the Urghul shaman, whose stillness spoke of coiled might, of strength gathering for an attack, Kiel might have grown from the stone itself. He might have planned to sit there forever.