The Last Mortal Bond Read online

  Her knuckles ached, and she looked down to find her hands strangling the reins, twisting them until the leather dug into her skin. Slowly, she relaxed her grip. The fault lay with the council, not with the people of Annur. You could hardly blame the city’s shopkeepers and washermen, artisans and builders, for being taken in by the lies of their leaders. They hadn’t been to the north, after all. They didn’t know Adare, couldn’t observe the workings of her mind. Most of them, if they’d ever caught a glimpse of a Malkeenian at all, had seen her in some imperial procession, glimpsed for a moment from behind a writhing mob, through a cordon of guards and soldiers.

  She was riding alone now to fix that. To show herself.

  She took a long breath, then looked over at Lehav, wondering how much of her agitation he’d noticed. If the man had been watching her, he was looking at the city now. “I don’t want to die,” she said finally. “But we are at war, Lehav. I don’t know the first thing about swords and formations, but I know you cannot win a battle without taking risks. Listen to me when I tell you this, and listen well: we will not survive this battle—not you, not me, not any of the men—if the people of this city do not look at me and see a woman who believes in herself, in her empire, and in them.”

  “They are fools,” the man replied. “They have no idea what to believe.”

  Adare shook her head bleakly. “My father told me something once. I haven’t forgotten it: If the people are foolish, he said, it is because their leader has failed them.”

  * * *

  For a long time no one said a word to her. She rode down the center of the bustling street in a shifting eddy of calm. Every person she passed—shopkeeps and carters, street sweepers and grocers—refused to meet her gaze. In a way, it was nothing new. Adare had lived a whole life in which people were uncomfortable around her eyes. Even high ministers and atreps preferred to drift past her without looking, fixing their own eyes elsewhere, moving just a little faster as she approached.

  For a long time, this was like that—an entire city refusing to meet her gaze. They followed, though, gathering like birds at a scattering of crumbs, holding back at what seemed a safe distance, whispering, hissing, arguing almost inaudibly, dozens then scores drawn from their day’s affairs by the possibility of celebration or bloodshed.

  Let it be celebration, Adare prayed.

  It was not.

  By the time she reached the Godsway—riding out toward the massive marble statue of Anlatun before turning east—word of her arrival had spread, the cluster trailing her swollen to a crowd. More and more people flooded in from side streets and alleys, skidding to a halt when they finally spotted her, pulling back, falling suddenly silent. Everyone seemed to experience the same shock, as though they hadn’t believed the words of their neighbors—The last Malkeenian. Alone in the city. Riding south. That shock, however, was fading, and the mob was drawing closer.

  As she angled down the Godsway, Adare’s heart throbbed behind her ribs. She’d lost sight of Lehav and his Sons. They were out there somewhere, lost in the tide of humanity, close enough to hear her if she screamed, probably, but too far away to do any good. She was starting to question her wisdom in keeping them back, but there was no time for questions. She had returned to Annur. A thousand eyes were upon her. Two thousand. Five. There was no counting them. The voices were getting louder, too, so loud she could barely hear her gelding’s hooves clopping over the enormous flagstones. She fought down the urge to wipe her sweaty palms against her robes, kept her eyes forward, fixed on Intarra’s Spear in the distance.

  At least I didn’t bring Sanlitun. The thought calmed her. Whatever happened next, whatever came of the growing mob, her son was hundreds of miles away in Aergad, tucked behind the castle walls with Nira watching over him. He is safe, Adare reminded herself.

  Then the first stone struck.

  It hit her just above the eye—a hot, white explosion that knocked her halfway off her horse. For a moment, it was all Adare could do to stay upright, to see anything beyond the pain’s brilliant blaze. She managed to keep her saddle either by good luck, divine favor, or sheer force of will. Blood ran down the side of her face in a hot sheet. Her stomach clenched, heaved; she thought she would vomit. Then, when she had fought that down, she realized they were chanting, shouting again and again the same terrible word: Tyrant. Tyrant. Tyrant.

  Her horse tried to bolt, but she pulled the reins back tight. If the mob thought she was trying to flee, they would tear her apart. She wanted to cringe, to curl into herself, to cover her bloody face with her arms before someone threw the next stone. Instead, when she’d managed to bring the horse back under control, she let go of the reins and spread her hands slowly, her unarmored body an offering to the crowd. They quieted a moment, and she spoke into that quiet.

  “You call me a tyrant. Does a tyrant return alone and unarmed to a city that hates her?”

  The words couldn’t have reached more than a dozen paces, but Adare could see the effect on those closest. They looked confused, hesitant, as though suddenly wishing they were farther back, away from the center of whatever storm was about to break. The mob pressed them forward all the same, forcing them, with its sheer weight, to step closer.

  Never speak to a crowd. Her father’s words, measured and steady. Especially not a crowd of thousands. Always speak to a single person.

  Pain hazing her vision, Adare picked one at random, a gaunt, middle-aged woman carrying a basket on her hip, just one of Annur’s millions dragged along by her own curiosity. Adare clung to that woman’s stare when she spoke again as though it were a post holding her up, a spear to lean on.

  “My generals told me to bring an army, but I did not bring an army. My guardsmen urged me to ring myself with their steel; I refused. My councillors implored me to return to Annur in disguise, or in the middle of the night, sneaking through the streets with my eyes hidden, my face obscured.” She raised her chin a fraction. The blood was hot on her face. Her head throbbed. She wondered if she was going to fall out of the saddle after all. “I did not. I will not.”

  The next rock grazed her chin. A third stone, smaller than the first two but sharp as a knife, sliced her cheek just below the eye. Her face was awash in blood now. It dripped onto the sleeves of her robe, onto the leather of her saddle. The horse, sensing the rage of the crowd, was starting to shy beneath her once more, snorting heavily and tossing his head, searching for a way out.

  The poor beast didn’t understand the truth, couldn’t understand, in the dim workings of his animal mind, that there was no way out. There never had been. Not since Adare fled the Dawn Palace a year earlier. Not since Ran il Tornja put a knife in her father.

  And now they’ll kill me, Adare thought. This is where I die, here, on the streets of the city where I was born.

  The packed savagery of the mob had grown too heavy. Any moment now, all those bodies would surge forward to collapse the fragile space in which she rode. Another stone would fly, and another, and another, until the blow that finally knocked her from the saddle. Her horse snorted again, on the edge of panic. Adare urged the beast on with her heels—better to die moving forward than standing still. One step. Then another. And to her surprise, the ring of space around her held.

  She tried to read some expression in the nearest faces. There was anger, and surprise, and disbelief, twisted lips, narrowed eyes, leveled fingers. A few tried to keep up the chant of tyrant, but most had let it go. They didn’t love her, but their curiosity had overwhelmed, at least for the moment, their fury. It was an opportunity, and Adare seized it.

  “I have come,” she said, raising her voice, “to heal the wound in Annur’s heart, to see the damage undone, even if it means my death.”

  “Or because the Urghul drove you from the north,” jeered a man a few paces away. Huge, lopsided face. Scraggly beard. Adare met his gaze.

  “My armies still hold the northern front—”

  Cries of pain and surprise cut her off, the bellow
ing of soldiers and the pounding of hooves on stone. People turned, baffled, fear’s awful flower blooming within them, and Adare turned with them, searching for the source of the sound. Horror struck through her at the sight of the men on horseback, horror that Lehav had disobeyed his orders, that he had somehow collected the Sons for a desperate charge into the sea of bodies.

  As the riders drew closer, however, Adare could see that they were not the Sons of Flame after all. She stared as the mounted men drove into the mob, laying about with clubs and the flats of swords. The armor was wrong for the Sons—all steel, no bronze ornament—and there were too many of them: three hundred, maybe four, more pouring out of the side streets, battering the men and women of Annur, cursing as they worked.

  They weren’t trying to kill, that much was clear, but a few pounds of hard-swung steel—even the flat of a blade—could finish a man. Adare stared, aghast, as a massive charger reared back, steel-shod hooves flashing in the light, shattering a woman’s skull. The man beside her screamed, a piercing wail of grief and rage as he tried to wrap the woman in his arms, to protect what was obviously past all protection. A cudgel took him in the back of the head, and he fell, still clutching the woman, both bodies disappearing under the trampling boots and the grinding hooves of the horses.

  “Stop!” Adare screamed. “Stop this!” Nausea churned in her gut, horror obliterating all pain. “Stop!”

  It was pointless. The mob, on the edge of murder only moments before, had crumbled, forgetting Adare entirely. All they wanted was escape. Panicked men and women stumbled into her horse, clutched at her legs, scrabbled at her bridle or saddle, tried to lift themselves clear of the violence. One man seized her by the knee, cursing as someone behind him, a boy not much older than ten, tried to shove him aside. Clinging desperately to her saddle’s cantle, Adare thrashed with her trapped leg, flinging the man free, then kicking him in the face with her boot. He screamed, nose smashed, then went down beneath the feet of his fellows. Not dead, but doomed.

  People dove into the small streets off the Godsway, cowered in doorways and storefronts, scrambled onto the plinths of the statues to get above the mad, killing press, and all the time the soldiers drove on, sun flashing off arms and polished armor, weapons rising and falling in the day’s late light, over and over and over.

  Finally, one soldier, smaller than the others, but closest to Adare, raised his cudgel, pointing at her.

  “Here!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “The Malkeenian! We have her!”

  It was hardly necessary to shout. It was over, Adare realized, just like that. The Godsway, ablaze with noise only moments before, had gone horribly, utterly quiet. The soldiers were closing in, but Adare barely noticed them. She stared, instead, at the dead.

  Dozens of crumpled bodies littered the ground. Some moved, groaning or sobbing with the effort. Most lay still. Here was a dead boy with his arm twisted awfully awry, like a bird’s broken wing. There was a broken woman, her shattered ribs thrusting white and obscene through flesh and cloth alike. Blood pooled everywhere on the wide flagstones.

  The short soldier kicked his horse forward through a knot of corpses, men and women who had died holding on to each other, then reined in next to Adare. She thought briefly of running, but there was nowhere to run. Instead, she turned to face the man.

  When he pulled off his helm, she saw that he was panting, sweating. Something had opened a gash just at the edge of his scalp, but he paid it no mind. His eyes, bright with the setting sun, were fixed on her.

  “Were you so eager to see me dead,” Adare demanded, surprised that her voice did not shake, “that you cut a path through your own people?”

  The soldier hesitated, cudgel sagging in his grip. He glanced down at the bodies, then back at Adare.

  “See you dead?”

  “Or captured,” she replied cooly. “Clapped in irons.”

  The man was shaking his head, slowly at first, then more vigorously, bowing in his saddle even as he protested. “No, Your Radiance. You misunderstand. The council sent us.”

  “I know the council sent you,” Adare said, a sick horror sloshing in her gut. It was the only explanation.

  “As soon as they heard, they sent us, scrambled up as quick as they could. You took a horrible risk, Your Radiance, arriving in the city unannounced. The moment they heard, they sent us.”

  Adare stared at him.

  I am a fool, Adare thought bleakly, the truth a lash across the face. She was covered in blood, her face hot with it, sticky. She scrubbed a hand over her brow. It came away soaked.

  “How badly are you harmed, Your Radiance?” the man asked. He was worried now, on the edge of fear.

  Adare studied the blood, bright against her darker palm. She watched it a moment, then looked down at the flagstones, at the bodies strewn there, dozens of them, crushed to death, eyes bulging, limbs twisted in the awful poses of their panic.

  I am a fool, and people have died for my folly.

  They’d been ready to kill her, of course. Probably would have, if the soldiers hadn’t arrived. It didn’t matter. They were her people. Annurians. Men and women that she had sworn both privately and publicly to protect, and they were dead because she had thought, idiotically, that she could return in triumph to the city of her birth. She had thought she risked only her own life.

  So very, very stupid.

  “You’re safe now, Your Radiance,” the soldier was saying. He had slung the cudgel from his belt, was bowing low in his saddle once more. The others had arranged themselves in a cordon around her, ten men deep. What foe they expected to hold back, Adare had no idea. “You’re safe with us,” the soldier said again.

  Adare shook her head, staring at one corpse splayed out on the ground. It was the woman, the one person in the crowd to whom she had spoken, brown eyes fixed blankly on the sky.

  “Safe,” Adare said. She wanted to cry, to puke, to scream, but it would not do for the Emperor of Annur to cry or scream. “Safe,” she said again, more quietly this time, that single syllable rancid on her tongue.

  8

  Gwenna stood in the bow of the Widow’s Wish, squinting toward the horizon. Though it was clear overhead, storm and the coming of night had bruised the eastern sky a livid purple darker than the sea itself. She couldn’t make out any land above the low, shifting swells, but the seabirds perched in the rigging meant they were close.

  “We’ll take the smallboat from here,” Gwenna said, turning to the ship’s captain.

  Quen Rouan raised his bushy brows. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “I wasn’t asking for your recommendation.”

  Gwenna had nothing against Rouan. Twelve days on the ship, and he’d treated her Wing with respect, even deference. He’d handled his vessel well through the squall that kicked up east of the Broken Bay, kept his men firmly in line, and didn’t ask questions. Gwenna had watched him, one calm afternoon, dive into the water with a rope around his waist to retrieve an albatross feather floating on the waves. For my daughter, he’d said after the men had hauled him back aboard. She’s never seen one. Rouan was a good sailor. A good captain. Maybe even a good man. Which was all the more reason to try to keep him from getting killed.

  “I don’t know how much you were told about this particular run…,” Gwenna began.

  Rouan held up a hand to forestall her. “I go where I’m told. That’s it. This time I was told to deliver you to the Qirins, and the Qirins are still at least thirty or forty miles east, depending on how much time we made up today. I’ll know as soon as the sun drops and the stars come out. Whatever the distance, it’s too much to cover in a smallboat.”

  Gwenna snorted. “Gent and I rowed a dory a hundred miles once, and that was before I turned thirteen. The distance is the whole point, Captain. Ships that get too close to those islands haven’t been coming back.”

  “I understand there is risk,” Rouan replied, stiffening, glancing east as though he expected to see topsails cresting t
he waves.

  “Well, there doesn’t have to be. Not for you. Get the boat in the water, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

  Rouan hesitated. Gwenna could read the pride in that hesitation, the reluctance to leave an honest job unfinished, the unwillingness to run from an unseen threat. He was brave, but he wasn’t trained for this.

  She made her voice hard. “I’m not asking, Captain.”

  He met her eyes a moment, then nodded brusquely, turning to bark orders at the half-dozen men on the deck. It was a good crew, and before the sun had slipped much farther down the western sky, the boat was bobbing in place, small hull bumping up against the larger vessel like a duckling against her mother. Two barrels of gear—food, mostly, and water, and extra weapons—had been packed a week earlier, and it took no time at all for Talal to secure them beneath the thwarts of the boat.

  “You’ll want the sail,” Rouan said. “At least partway.”

  Gwenna shook her head. “No, we won’t.”

  She started to turn, but the captain brought her up short with a hand on her arm. Gwenna went for her knife, had the ’Kent-kissing thing half drawn before her mind could calm the reflexes of her flesh. Rouan looked at the steel, pursed his lips, and withdrew his hand.

  “The world’s all upside down,” he said quietly. “I’ll grant you that. But not everyone’s trying to kill you.”

  Gwenna forced herself to shrug. “That hasn’t been my experience.”

  He watched her for a long time.

  “How old are you?” he asked finally.

  Gwenna met the gaze. “Does it matter?”

  The man shook his head slowly. “I suppose it doesn’t.” He turned east, toward where the Islands lay over the horizon. “What do you think you’ll find?”