The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Well,” Gwenna replied, “now it’s back.”

  * * *

  I didn’t know.

  When it was all finished, that was the phrase uttered more often than any other, uttered in nearly endless variations—screaming, sobbing, pleading.

  I didn’t know about the murders on Hook.

  I didn’t know who to trust.

  I didn’t know about the builders he killed.

  I didn’t know about the ships he sank.

  We were Kettral.…

  We were just soldiers.…

  We were fighting for Annur.…

  I didn’t know.…

  I didn’t know.…

  I didn’t know.…

  Some of the men and women reeked of deceit, eyes shifting away from Gwenna every time they opened their mouths; not everyone could be ignorant of the violence that had held the Islands in thrall for nearly a year. Some of the others, though, seemed genuinely perplexed, baffled to find themselves bound beneath the bloody tree.

  “Of course we killed people,” said one skinny man with a birthmark across half his face. “That’s what Kettral do. We’re soldiers.”

  “It matters,” Gwenna ground out, “who you kill. And why.”

  He shook his head blankly, perplexed. “We followed orders. We didn’t know—”

  “If you say that one more time,” Gwenna replied quietly, “I will cut out your tongue.” She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder, toward Qora, and Quick Jak and the others. “They came from Arim, too. They were washouts, just like you. Jakob Rallen tried to give them orders, but when they realized what was happening, they refused. A lot of them died for refusing the orders you so happily followed.”

  The man just stared at her. “They were traitors.”

  He was still saying it, hours later, still in utter disbelief, when she finally cut his throat.

  In the end, they killed all of Rallen’s soldiers. Gwenna did some of the grisly work herself, partly because it seemed necessary to acknowledge her role in the whole affair, partly to set an example for the other Kettral: “This is not about vengeance,” she said as the first body dropped. “It is about justice. You will kill quickly, cleanly, or you will join the dead.”

  It didn’t take long. That fact, as much as the blood itself, made Gwenna sick. It should have taken longer, it should have been harder to turn two dozen men and women into meat. She forced the thought aside, turning her attention finally to Manthe and Hobb. She’d left them for last partly so that they could see the fate brought on them by their own betrayal, mostly because Gwenna herself wasn’t sure what to say. They’d tried, after all, to fight against Jakob Rallen, had endured the same dangers and privations as the others for so long.…

  “Why?” Gwenna asked quietly.

  She expected screaming from Manthe and bluster from Hobb. That was what she’d faced, more or less, since first descending into the Hole. Instead, they were both silent. Despite the ropes binding their arms behind their backs, Manthe had sagged against her husband’s side, and he’d managed to shift slightly to let her lay her head against his shoulder. Gwenna realized, as she stared at the married couple, that she’d never seen them outside the flickering firelight of the cave. They looked older in the sunlight, exhausted. Even Hobb, who had seemed so strong in the shadows, was obviously well past his best fighting years. Manthe didn’t look terrified anymore; her dark eyes were weary, resigned.

  “Spare us the charade,” Hobb murmured, meeting Gwenna’s gaze. “We all know where this ends.”

  “I want to know why,” Gwenna said again.

  For a long time, she thought he would refuse to answer. He turned away, pressed his lips to his wife’s head, just where her graying hair met her brow. She closed her eyes and smiled weakly—the first smile Gwenna had ever seen from the woman. After a long time, Hobb sighed, and turned back to Gwenna.

  “You think you understand good and evil. Right and wrong. Justice and betrayal.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you do. I’ll tell you one thing, though, that you don’t understand: love.”

  He shook his head, as though he himself were surprised at the notion.

  “I would do anything for Manthe. I thought your idiocy was going to get her hurt. Killed. I did what I could to protect her.”

  “You were wrong,” Gwenna said, forcing down whatever stone was rising in her throat.

  He shrugged again. “That’s clear now. It wasn’t then.”

  “But…”

  “I’m done explaining,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not something you can explain.”

  He turned away. His wife looked up, met his eyes, and smiled wider.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “As am I, my love,” he replied gently.

  They kissed tenderly and for a long time, ignoring Gwenna, ignoring everyone, as though for just that moment they were alone, unbound, free, as though the bright, unfeeling blade of justice were not waiting just a pace away.

  * * *

  “If I never have to do that again, it’ll be too soon,” Gwenna said.

  Talal nodded, refilled her wooden tankard, and passed it back to her.

  After the executions, Gwenna had spent the entire afternoon in the ocean. She swam the circuit from Qarsh to Hook and back three times, until she finally felt the salt waves had washed the blood from her skin, her scalp, from beneath her nails, until the trembling was gone from her arms, replaced by honest exhaustion. When she finally waded out of the water onto the beach by the Kettral headquarters, Talal and Annick were waiting. The sniper was holding tankards and, instead of her bow, a long staff of something that looked like bone. Talal had a small wooden barrel beneath his arm.

  “Someone please tell me we’re going to get fantastically drunk,” Gwenna said as she slicked the seawater from her skin.

  “We’re going to get fantastically drunk,” Talal said.

  Gwenna glanced at Annick, then down at the tankards—three of them. “The last time I checked, you didn’t drink beer. You always claimed it messed up your shooting.”

  Annick shrugged. “That’s when we’re training. Or on a mission.”

  “Which is pretty much always.”

  “Not tonight,” the sniper said. “Besides, I could drink half that barrel and still shoot better than anyone within five hundred miles.”

  Talal chuckled quietly. “Was that a boast, Annick?”

  “Just a fact.”

  “What about that?” Gwenna asked, pointing at the pale staff.

  “Kettral bone,” Annick replied. “Stronger than wood, lighter. All Kettral snipers make their own bow after the Trial. I never had the chance.”

  Gwenna stared. “Tell me you didn’t slaughter one of our very few remaining birds so that you could have a slightly better bow.”

  “It’s from the storeroom. And the bow will be much better. Not slightly better.”

  Talal just shook his head, while Gwenna tried to imagine what that might mean.

  “Do you think there’s a limit,” she asked finally, “to the distance from which you’d like to be able to kill people?”

  The sniper’s brow wrinkled, as though she were pondering a nonsensical question. “No.”

  They spent the evening and the first half of the night out on the breakwater at the harbor’s head. Gwenna threw stones into the waves, Annick worked her bone bow stave with her belt knife, and Talal kept refilling the tankards when they were dry. For just a while, it was possible to forget the corpses of the traitors they’d burned, the people they’d lost, the justice they’d meted out. It was almost possible to forget everything, to believe they were still cadets shirking some miserable assignment, that when they finished the barrel they would stumble back along the uneven stones of the breakwater to find the Eyrie whole and buzzing with life—men and women in the ring, in the mess hall, coming and going from the barracks. They might run into Valyn and Laith, the Flea or Gent or Blackfeather Finn. They might pull third watch
for absconding, but that would be the worst of it. No one would ask them to settle the big issues, to solve the questions of life and death. That was what command was for.

  Only now we are the command, Gwenna thought, staring at the lights of Hook where they reflected off the black water of the sound.

  “How did it happen?” she muttered drunkenly, aloud.

  “Which part?” Talal asked.

  Gwenna waved a hand around her, trying to indicate Qarsh, the Islands, the whole busted world. “This.”

  “What?” the leach asked, nudging her in the ribs. “A year ago you didn’t expect to be running the entire Eyrie?”

  “I’m not,” Gwenna protested.

  “You are,” Annick said, without looking up from her bow.

  “That’s insane.”

  The sniper just shrugged.

  “Annick’s right,” Talal said, voice sober, subdued. “According to Kaden, Daveen Shaleel made it out, but she’s down in the Waist somewhere, if she’s even still alive. We are here.”

  “So you run it,” Gwenna snapped.

  The leach shook his head. “You’re the Wing leader. You’re in charge.”

  “I don’t want this.”

  “When did that start mattering?” Annick asked. “We’re soldiers. We do what we have to. Wanting doesn’t come into it.”

  “What a comfort.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be comforting.”

  “I know that, Annick,” Gwenna snapped. She hurled another rock into the water. It disappeared, the splash swallowed by the relentless wash of the waves. Behind them somewhere, bunked down in the old Eyrie barracks, were seventeen men and women, cadets who had become washouts who had become, finally, Kettral. They’d survived the fight against Jakob Rallen, but that was hardly the last fight.

  “They’re gonna wish they’d never left Arim,” Gwenna muttered.

  “Maybe,” Talal said. “Maybe not.”

  Annick slipped a bowstring from her pocket, bent the newly finished stave, and fit the string to the bow. She’d carried an arrow with her, all the way out to the end of the breakwater. Gwenna watched as the sniper nocked it silently, drew the bow, then let fly directly at the moon. The feathered shaft climbed against pale light, climbed higher than any normal arrow, impossibly high, then dropped out of sight.

  “Well, that was a waste of an arrow,” Gwenna said.

  Annick shrugged. “It’s nice, once in a while, to shoot at something you can’t hit.”

  Talal chuckled.

  After a moment, Gwenna kicked back the last of her ale, then set the tankard on the stone. “All right. We’ve got five birds. Which means five Wings.”

  “The numbers don’t quite work out,” Talal observed.

  “So they don’t quite work out. We stock up tonight with munitions, blades, and blacks. We’re in the air at first light.”

  The leach raised his eyebrows. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going where they need us,” Gwenna replied. “We’re going where the fight is.”

  40

  The short, sturdy horses penned inside a wide corral at the edge of the village whickered nervously as Kaden and Long Fist passed.

  They smell the strangeness on us, he thought. They know that something’s wrong.

  Cook fire smoke mixed with the thick, wet smell of the mud and reeds. It rose in twisting plumes from a dozen fire pits before the open doors of the reed huts, hovering for a moment, then torn apart by the warm wind blowing down out of the mountains. Men and women in loose tan robes tended those fires, cooking fish and plantains over the open coals. They watched the two strangers approach silently, their dark, weather-battered faces betraying nothing. They raised no voices, either in challenge or welcome.

  “This could take time,” Kaden murmured. “If Triste is even here.”

  “A matter of moments,” Long Fist replied. “There are only so many huts.”

  “At least two dozen. She could hide for half the morning, especially if the locals are helping her. Searching—”

  “We do not search.”

  Before Kaden could ask what that meant, a couple of children came darting toward them, chattering a strange babble as they swooped in, then doubling back quick as swallows, shouting to friends or companions Kaden couldn’t see. They couldn’t have been much more than five, a girl and boy, siblings maybe, dark hair and eyes, brown skin made browner by hours playing in the dirt. They were the sort of village children you might find anywhere from the Romsdals to the Waist.

  When Kaden and Long Fist reached the town’s central square, they found a knot of men and women drawn up before the largest of the thatched huts, all facing them warily. A couple of the men held axes—the sort of thing they might use on the cedars up in the mountain valleys—and one of the women clutched a long knife at her side, blade still bloody from the antelope that hung half gutted from a low branch a dozen paces distant. Tools, not weapons. It was possible that the villagers had just been surprised going about their morning’s work. There was something in those postures, however, that looked guarded, and when Kaden shaped his face into a smile, no one smiled back.

  “We’re looking for a girl,” he said. “A young woman. Black hair. Violet eyes. Striking. Probably very tired.”

  It was tempting to say the rest of it, to warn these people that even as he spoke soldiers were coming, well-trained men who would burn the village to the dirt to find their quarry, men who would not be deterred by a pair of axes and a skinning knife. Such an announcement, however, would cause almost as much confusion as the attack itself, and if Triste was here, he didn’t want to lose her in the ensuing panic.

  “Have you seen her?”

  No one spoke. Kaden studied their faces, their hands. The tightness around the eyes was obvious, the slight twist in the lips, the whitening knuckles. One woman glanced over her shoulder toward a cluster of other huts, then jerked her head back as though burned. Kaden’s heart beat faster. He forced it to slow. Triste was here—that much was obvious. They just needed to get her out.

  “We are her friends,” he said, holding up his hands, palms out, as though in surrender.

  The silence held for a moment. Then a man with a headscarf piled high on his head stepped forward. He might have been thirty-five or forty, thin, barefoot beneath the hem of his robe. Even in the morning’s weak light, Kaden could make out the ropy strength in his shoulders and arms, the scars webbing the backs of his hands.

  “There’s no one here,” he said in imperfect Annurian, voice surprisingly soft, like the wash of wind through the reeds.

  Kaden suppressed a grimace. “Please,” he said. “She’s in danger.”

  The man met his eyes. “We say a thing here: Beware sand from the south, rain from the west, news from the north, and strangers walking out of the east.” He pursed his lips, glanced up at the sky. “There is no news. No sand or rain…” He turned his attention pointedly to Kaden, then to Long Fist, leaving the rest unsaid.

  Kaden glanced over his shoulder. The scrubby trees obscured the dust kicked up by il Tornja’s soldiers, but they would be closer, closing.

  “We know that she is here,” Kaden said, turning back to the group, “or that she has been here recently.…”

  Before he could finish, Long Fist stepped forward. The shaman didn’t talk until he stood just a hand’s breadth from the man who had spoken. When the villager took an uncertain step back, Long Fist moved forward to fill the gap. It reminded Kaden of a dance he’d seen years ago in the Dawn Palace, only there was no play in these movements, no flirtation. The Urghul was a full head higher than the other, and he had to crane his neck to look down at him.

  “What…,” the slender man began, raising his hands.

  Long Fist lifted a single finger, pointed it straight up, then pushed the other man’s jaw shut. Kaden thought for a moment that the shaman was leaving his finger there, the nail pressed into the soft flesh just behind the chin, to keep the other from speaking. Then
he saw the blood, saw the man’s body twitch, saw him rise up onto his toes as Long Fist drove that finger up and up, through the skin and the muscle folded beneath. Another heartbeat and the bloody finger appeared in the opening mouth, behind the lower teeth and beneath the tongue, curving up and out, like a hook through a fish’s jaw. The villager twitched, a series of spasmodic convulsions, but made no move to pull back or to fight, as though he were too shocked by the abrupt attack to do more than dangle from the Urghul’s crooked finger.

  Kaden stepped forward, started to object, but a woman’s scream cut him off. She was the one with the knife. While the others stared, paralyzed, she lunged, staggering across the dusty ground with her blade outstretched, small features smeared with fear and fury. Long Fist glanced toward her, smiled, then pursed his lips as though he wanted to blow her a kiss. She covered another two paces. Then he whistled—a high sound slicing through her scream—and she collapsed, knife clattering to the gravel. The shaman watched as she thrashed at the dirt, suddenly blind to everything but her own agony. She clawed at her ears, pressed her palms hard against the sides of her head as though trying to block out that piercing whistle. As she rolled into a tiny ball, blood seeped between her fingers.

  Long Fist ignored the man dangling from his finger, turning instead to his horrified neighbors.

  “Where is the girl?”

  A dozen of the villagers ran, darting away into the high scrub like panicked rabbits. The rest just stared, eyes scrubbed blank by their terror. One man started sobbing.

  “No,” Kaden said, raising his hand as though there was anything in the world he could do with it. “We don’t need to do this. Let him go, let him—”

  “You forget the stakes,” Long Fist said, turning to Kaden. “The game is about more than these few ragged souls.”

  His blue eyes had gone a gray so dark it looked black. Kaden was reminded suddenly, incongruously, of Valyn. He shoved the memory away, hauling his mind back to the moment.

  “They are not our enemies.”

  “I said nothing of enemies.” Long Fist returned his attention to the man suspended from his finger. The villager had gone into spasms. “The Urghul would account this a great honor.”