The Last Mortal Bond Page 7

  “I should have finished it then,” she said finally, voice low but hard.

  Kaden watched her in silence. It seemed a lifetime ago that Tarik Adiv had arrived on the ledges of Ashk’lan with a hundred Aedolians at his back, with the death of an emperor on his tongue, with Triste. She had been a girl then. She was a girl no longer.

  He’d known her barely a year, and in that year there hadn’t been a single day in which she wasn’t running or fighting, lying in a cell or screaming beneath an Ishien knife. Not one day. Kaden’s own struggle had worn him, hardened him, and yet his own struggle had been nothing beside hers. A year of pain and terror could change a person, change her forever. Triste was no longer the wide-eyed daughter of a leina caught up in currents she could neither swim nor escape. That much was obvious. What she had become, however, what the pain and fear had made of her, what she had made of herself … Kaden had no idea.

  “If you had continued driving the knife, you would have killed more than yourself and your goddess. You would have severed her touch from this world. You would have killed our capacity for pleasure, for joy.”

  “At least, that’s the story your Csestriim tells you,” Triste spat. “The story he tells me.”

  Kaden shook his head. “I’ve gone beyond Kiel’s account. Well beyond. The Dawn Palace has the most complete chronicles in the world—both human and Csestriim. I’ve been down in the libraries almost every moment I haven’t been struggling with the council. Kiel’s account fits with what I’ve read, with the histories of the gods and the Csestriim wars.”

  “I thought he wanted to kill me,” she said. “It’s the only way to set his goddess free, right?”

  “She is your goddess,” Kaden said again.

  “Not anymore, she’s not. She stopped being my goddess when she forced her way into my head.”

  “She chose you,” Kaden countered, “because of your devotion.”

  “That can’t be true. There are scores of leinas in the temple, all of them more adept in Ciena’s arts than I’ll ever be, all of them utterly committed to the service of their goddess.” She grimaced. “I was … a mischance. Some minister’s by-blow.”

  “Tarik Adiv had the burning eyes,” Kaden pointed out. “Your father was related, however distantly, to my own. Which means that you, too, are descended from Intarra.”

  The notion still surprised him. For hundreds of years the Malkeenians had staked their imperial claim on that lineage, on those eyes, on the claim that there was only one divine family. Forking branches of the tree could lead to civil war, to the ruin of Annur.

  Triste shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Kaden replied. “It is the only thing that makes sense. According to the legend, Intarra bore the first Malkeenian millennia ago. The family would have ramified. My branch cannot be the only one.”

  “I don’t have the eyes,” she countered.

  “Neither does Valyn.”

  Triste bared her teeth. “Even if it’s true, what does it mean? What is it worth? What does it have to do with this bitch lodged inside my skull?”

  Kaden could only shake his head. Even Kiel’s insights extended only so far. Even the Csestriim, it seemed, could not peer into the minds of the gods.

  “We don’t know everything,” he said quietly. “I don’t know everything.”

  “But you still want to kill me.”

  The words weren’t angry, not anymore. Something had snuffed her anger, quick and sure as a fist clamped over a candle’s flame. She sounded exhausted. Kaden himself felt exhausted, exhausted from the long climb and from the fear that someone had broken into the dungeon, found Triste, hurt her.

  “No,” he said quietly, searching for another word, some phrase adequate to convey his worry. The Shin had taught him nothing, unfortunately, of human consolation. If he could have, he would have put a silent hand on her shoulder, but he could not reach through the bars. There was only that single syllable, and so he said it again, helplessly, “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “I misspoke. You want me to kill myself.”

  “The obviate isn’t suicide. There is a ceremony to be observed. A ritual. Without it, the goddess can’t escape. She cannot ascend.” He paused. “And this is not something I want.”

  “Cannot ascend,” Triste said, ignoring his last comment. “Cannot ascend.” Her laugh was sudden and bright as a bell. Then gone.

  “Why is that funny?”

  Triste shook her head, then gestured to the bars of her cage. “It’s a good problem to have. That’s all. Forget about ascending—I’d be happy to get out of this cage for the night.”

  For a while they were both silent.

  “Has she … spoken to you?” Kaden asked finally.

  “How would I know? I never remember the times when she’s in control.” She fixed him with that bright, undeniable gaze. “For all I know, you’re making the whole thing up, everything about the goddess. Maybe I’m just insane.”

  “You saw what happened in the Jasmine Court,” Kaden said gravely. “What you did. What Ciena did through you.”

  Triste drew a long, shuddering breath, opened her mouth to respond, then shut it and turned away. The memory of the slaughter sat between them—the ravaged bodies, shattered skulls—invisible, immovable.

  “I won’t do it,” she said finally. “Your ritual.”

  “It isn’t my ritual, and I didn’t come here to ask you to take part in it.”

  “But you want me to.” She still didn’t look at him. “You’re hoping—or whatever monks do that’s like hoping—that I’ll accept it, that I’ll embrace it. Well, I won’t. You’ll have to carve her out of me.”

  Kaden shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that, as I’ve explained before. The obviate, were we to attempt it, seems to require your consent, your active participation.”

  “Well, you can’t have it,” she snarled, turning on him in a sudden fury. “You can’t fucking have it! My mother gave me up to my father, my father gave me up to you. This ’Shael-spawned goddess is inside my skull, she forced her way in without ever even asking me, and now you want to sacrifice me. And you can. Obviously. All of you can give me up, can trade me from one person to the next, pass me along as long as you want.

  “You can hit me, and you have. You can hurt me, and you have. You can lock me in one prison or the next”—she waved a hand around her—“and you have. You can give me to Rampuri fucking Tan or to the Ishien or to your council.” She glared at him, the late sun’s light reflected in her eyes. “I’m used to being given up by now. I expect it. But I’ll tell you what I won’t do—I won’t accept it. I won’t play along. For a while, a tiny little while, I thought you were different, Kaden. I thought we might actually…” She broke off, tears in her eyes, shaking her head angrily. When she spoke again, her voice was low, furious. “Everyone trades me away like a stone on the board, but I will not trade away myself.”

  Kaden nodded. “I know.”

  She stared at him, teeth slightly bared, breath rasping in her throat. “Then why are you here?”

  He hesitated, but could think of no reason to skirt the truth. “To check on you. There was an attack.”

  She stared. “Here? In the Dawn Palace?”

  “In Intarra’s Spear.” He pointed down through the dizzying emptiness toward the human floors thousands of feet below.

  “And you needed to tell me?”

  “I needed,” Kaden replied carefully, “to see that you were all right.”

  Triste looked moved for half a heartbeat, then the expression melted off her face. “To be sure she is all right,” she said again. “You think it was il Tornja, trying to get at the goddess.”

  Kaden nodded. “I think it is a possibility.”

  She glared at him. “Well, since you asked, I am not all right, Kaden. I haven’t been all right in a very long time.” Her eyes had gone wide, vacant. She wasn’t focusing on him anymore. “I d
on’t even know what all right would be anymore. We’re all going to die, right? Probably horribly, most of us. Maybe all you can do is die where you want to die, end things on your own terms.”

  “Few of us have the luxury to act only on our own terms.” Kaden shook his head. “I do not.”

  “But you’re not in here, are you?” Triste said, raising her hands to seize the bars for the first time. “You’re free.”

  Kaden watched her silently for a moment. “And what would you do, Triste, if you were free?”

  She held his eyes, then seemed to slump, as though collapsing beneath the weight of the very notion of freedom. When she responded, her voice was thin, far away: “I’d go somewhere. Somewhere as far from your ’Kent-kissing palace as possible. There’s a place my mother used to talk about, a little village by an oasis in the shadow of the Ancaz Mountains, just at the edge of the Dead Salts. As far from the rest of the world as you can get, she used to say. I’d go there. That village. That’s where I’d go.…”

  It was hard to know how seriously to take the words. Triste’s eyes were unfocused, her speech slightly slurred with the adamanth. She had fixed her gaze over Kaden’s shoulder, as though on something unseen in the distance.

  “If I could get you out,” he began slowly, “if I could get you clear of the prison and the palace for a while, somewhere else, would you be willing to consider—”

  All at once her attention was there, concentrated furiously on him. “I already told you,” she snarled. “No. Whoever comes to kill me—il Tornja, or Kiel, or you—he’s going to have to do it himself.”

  “And the goddess…”

  “I hope she fucking feels it when the knife bites.”

  * * *

  The descent from the prison took Kaden almost as long as the climb. By the time he neared his father’s study, his legs wobbled beneath him and his hands felt twisted into claws from so much clutching of the railing. The simple fact that Triste was alive should have come as a relief, but despite her survival, there was no comfort in the larger picture.

  Every visible future was grim. Triste killing herself without performing the obviate, or being killed. Il Tornja’s assassins hacking off her head, or the council throwing her alive onto a pyre with a few self-righteous words about law and justice. In some futures, it was Kaden himself killing her, holding the knife when there was no one else left to hold it. He could feel the girl’s blood hot on his hands, could see her angry, helpless eyes locked on him as he tried to carve the goddess free of her flesh.

  He wanted nothing more, when he finally stepped from the luminous emptiness of the Spear into human floors below, than to lock himself inside his study, set aside all emotion, and drift in the vaniate.

  Kiel, however, was still in the huge chamber, sitting motionless in the half darkness, pondering the ko board before him, setting the stones on the board slowly—white, then black, white, then black—working through the moves of an ancient contest first played by men or Csestriim centuries dead. Kaden watched in silence for a while, but could make no sense of it.

  After a dozen moves, he shook his head, turning away from the incomprehensible game on the ko board, from Kiel’s unwavering gaze. For a moment, he looked at Annur; the city was even more baffling than the game of stones, the very sight of it a reproach. Kaden had survived the attack on Ashk’lan, had survived the kenta and the Dead Heart, had managed to overthrow Tarik Adiv, seize the Dawn Palace, establish the republic, and thwart Adare and il Tornja, and for what? Annur was in shambles, and il Tornja, according to Kiel, had managed to outmaneuver him at every juncture from hundreds of miles away. Kaden blew out a long breath, crossed to the wide wooden table, and flipped idly through the loose parchment stacked there.

  Intarra knew that he tried to keep track of it all. To make sense of it. Orders for conscription, new laws intended to curb banditry and piracy, new taxes intended to fund all manner of ill-founded projects in the faltering republic. He read it all, but what did he know about any of it? What did it all—

  He paused, finger on a sheet he hadn’t seen before. Just a few lines of inked text. A simple signature. No seal. He shook his head in disbelief.

  “What?” Kiel asked.

  Kaden stared, reading the words again, and then again.

  “What?” Kiel asked again.

  “It wasn’t a theft,” he managed finally. “They didn’t break in to take anything.”

  The Csestriim raised his brows. “Oh?”

  “They broke into my study,” Kaden said, raising the sheet of parchment, “to leave this.”

  6

  At first, the steady thock, thock, thock of arrows striking wood was comforting. It was familiar, at least, from a thousand memories, long days training on the Islands, pulling bowstrings over and over until your shoulders ached and your fingers bled. The long warehouse in which they waited, however, was not the Islands. The air was hot and close, so dusty that breathing was difficult. Gwenna had chosen it for tactical reasons—long sight lines and redundant exits, proximity to the water if everything went to shit—but the place was beginning to feel like a trap. A fucking boring trap, but a trap all the same, and the relentless thrumming of the bowstring and thudding of arrows wasn’t helping. Not anymore.

  “Annick,” Gwenna growled. “You think you’ve had enough target practice for the day?” She pointed to the arrows lodged in the timber post. “I think it’s dead.”

  The sniper drew the bowstring, held it, then looked over. “Is there another way you think we should be spending our time while we wait?”

  “What about resting? Maybe even sleeping. We did just break into the Dawn Palace. You’re allowed to take a break, you know.”

  Annick watched her a moment more, then let the arrow fly. Before it struck the beam, she had another notched and drawn, and then it was flying. Then another.

  Thock, thock, thock.

  Like a woodpecker—only woodpeckers weren’t that persistent. And woodpeckers didn’t kill you.

  Annick cocked her head to the side, studying her work. The shafts were clustered together, packed into a space the size of an eyeball. A small eyeball. If the performance gave the sniper any pleasure, she didn’t show it.

  “Not tired,” she said, then started across the warped floorboards to reclaim her shafts.

  Gwenna opened her mouth to respond, then clamped it shut. There was no point arguing with Annick. If she wasn’t tired, she wasn’t tired. Gwenna herself was exhausted. She felt like she’d been exhausted forever, since fleeing the Qirins, at least. The last nine months should have been a rest, of sorts. After the battle of Andt-Kyl, all three of them had been busted up, and bad. One of the Urghul had put half a lance through Annick’s leg. Talal had three broken fingers, three broken ribs, and a fractured scapula—all, presumably, from the final blast that had crippled Balendin. That same blast had sent a chunk of stone into the side of Gwenna’s skull, and another into her leg, fracturing it just above the knee.

  They should have been dead, all of them. Those wounds would have killed anyone else. Talal had some theory, though, about how the slarn egg protected them, made them more resilient and faster healing. Gwenna didn’t feel fucking resilient. None of them, in the immediate wake of the battle, could walk more than a quarter mile at a stretch, and Gwenna kept passing out when she moved too quickly. They searched slowly and futilely for Valyn. After a month, there was nothing left to search, not if they didn’t intend to scour every bit of forest south of the Romsdals.

  The three of them had found an abandoned cabin southeast of Andt-Kyl, some hunter’s shack or outlaw’s hovel already gone half to seed. They had hunkered down and worked really hard for the next few months on just not dying. That task had proven a good sight harder than any of them expected, and by the end of it—after months trying to lie still in between hacking up blood, of washing and dressing wounds, of living off the mushrooms they could gather within a few paces of the cabin and whatever birds Annick could bring do
wn with her flatbow—the three of them looked more like corpses than warriors.

  It meant months of convalescence, the rest of the summer and fall—walking before she could run, floating before she could swim, lifting the fucking swords before there was any point in trying to swing them—before Gwenna felt even half qualified to call herself a Kettral once more. An entire summer and fall gone before they could even contemplate going anywhere or killing anyone. Gwenna had no idea where to go or who to kill, but it seemed like they were going to need to do plenty of both. When they were finally whole enough to travel, the snow was already piled up to the eaves. Covering half a mile took half a day. And so, for another season, they were forced to hunker down, live off of venison stew, and try not to kill one another.

  The extra winter months up north weren’t all bad. It meant they were all fully healed before heading south, at least as strong and quick as they had been back on the Islands, wounds that should not have closed at all finally knitted. The disadvantage was that the rest of the world hadn’t been convalescing inside a snowbound cottage for nine months, and when Gwenna, Talal, and Annick finally emerged, they had no idea what the fuck was going on.

  Nothing good—that much was clear as soon as they broke free of the northern forests. The Urghul were everywhere, burning shit, killing people, erecting altars to their suffering and their god, generally getting blood on everything. Worse, Balendin was still alive. Gwenna had hoped that somehow, in the chaos and carnage of Andt-Kyl, the traitorous Kettral leach would have taken a blade to the brain. It seemed plausible, at least, given the twin Annurian armies that had swept up the coasts of Scar Lake.

  Hope, as usual, proved to be a miserable bitch.

  They weren’t even out of the woods before they started hearing reports of an Urghul commander who was not Urghul, a man with dark skin and dark hair, a leach with black eagles perched on either shoulder, a warrior whose thirst for blood outstripped even that of the Urghul. The horsemen called him the Anvil, but it was obviously Balendin. He couldn’t be fought, people whispered. Couldn’t be defeated. He could light whole forests ablaze with a wave of his hand, could snap his fingers and watch the heads of his foes explode.