The Last Mortal Bond

11

Adare sat at the end of the dock, bare feet rising and falling in the water as the low waves slapped against the pilings. It was hardly an imperial posture, but she’d been trying to look imperial all morning, sitting spear-straight in her chair above the smoldering ruins of the great map of Annur, trying not to choke on the day-old smoke and ash as she signed into law the treaty intended to heal the rift between her empire and the republic. It felt good to recline on her elbows at the end of the palace docks, to watch the great ships out in the bay lean with the breeze, to forget for just a moment how close she’d come to destroying it all.

It would have been nice to forget about it, but her brother refused to let her.

“How did you know,” Kaden asked quietly, “that the entire hall wouldn’t catch fire?”

“I didn’t.”

“How did you know someone on the council wouldn’t attack you? Kill you?”

“I didn’t.”

“How did you know they’d agree to ratify the treaty after all that?”

“I didn’t, Kaden. I was fucking terrified, if you want to know the truth, but I didn’t see any other way.” She blew out a long, frustrated sigh, then turned to face him.

Kaden sat cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, his posture, like the rest of him, contained, closed. Adare had no idea how he could sit like that with the burns. The fire in the council chamber had turned the air instantly, if only momentarily, to flame. Adare’s own skin was tender to the point of agony, a hint of sullen red spreading beneath the brown. The cold water felt so good on her feet and legs that she was tempted to jump in, to float on her back in the cool shade under the dock itself.

She used to love to swim beneath the docks as a child, maybe because it drove her Aedolians to distraction. But Birch and Fulton were gone now-one quit, the other dead-and she was not a child but a woman grown, the Emperor, since the morning’s signing, of all Annur. There could be no more floating beneath docks.

“You have no idea,” Kaden said slowly, “how difficult it was convincing the council to agree to this treaty. They did not want you back.”

“And you did?” Adare asked, studying him warily.

The man who sat before her on the rough planks of the dock bore little resemblance to the boy she remembered from her childhood. At eight, Kaden had been thin and bony, all elbows and knees, dark, unruly hair flopping into his eyes whenever he ran, which seemed to be all the time. He and Valyn had been raised in the same palace as Adare, disciplined by the same parents and guards, schooled by the same tutors, and yet the two brothers had managed to find a freedom inside the red walls that Adare had never truly felt.

It wasn’t that she had resented the Dawn Palace as a child. Far from it. Every time she walked the long colonnades, or prayed inside the scented stillness of the ancient temples, or stood in the cool shadow of the Unhewn Throne, she felt the pride brimming within her, pride of her family, of her name, of her palace, and of the history it represented. Every time she strolled through the immaculately kept gardens, sprays of jasmine and gardenia winding above her, or paused to look up at the graceful angles of the Floating Hall, suspended a hundred feet above the courtyards, every time she stood at the top of Intarra’s Spear, gazing out over an empire that stretched away over ocean, and forest, and tilled ground, stretched away toward every horizon, every time she thought of the scope and breadth and majesty of it all, she felt her own good fortune.

That fortune, however, had weight. Like the golden robes her father wore during celebrations of solstice and equinox, Adare’s own glittering, gorgeous position lay heavily on her slender shoulders. For as long as she could remember, she had felt it, that weight. To be a Malkeenian was to acknowledge the full heft of history, to feel present events, like some priceless silk, slide between her small hands. The high red walls of the Dawn Palace, instead of keeping the world back, instead of blocking it out, held in the whole elaborate apparatus of state, it was the hub around which the spokes of that great world spun. Adare felt that spinning, felt it every day, almost from the moment she woke … even though she knew she would never be the Emperor, that the unfathomable weight of her father’s responsibility would never be hers, but Kaden’s.

Kaden, for his part, had always seemed blissfully ignorant.

The boy she had known was always at his older brother’s side, sneaking away from lessons, trying to elude his own guardsmen, racing around the ramparts or delving down into the deepest cellars. He shared the burning eyes with Sanlitun and Adare, but he seemed to have no idea of or interest in what they meant, in what he would have to do. Most times, Adare could imagine Krim, the kennel master sitting on the Unhewn Throne before Kaden; the kennel master, at least, approached his work with a serious, sober regard.

The only times Adare had ever seen Kaden go still were when he thought he was alone, when he thought no one was watching. Once, frustrated with her failure to understand some mathematical proof, Adare had climbed up to the seaward wall after her lessons, determined to sit there, regardless of the hard salt wind, working through the problem until she unlocked it. To her surprise, she had stumbled across Kaden. His Aedolians were a hundred paces off, blocking all approach to the high wall, and he was leaning against the stone, staring east between the ramparts. Adare started to approach, then paused, suddenly, almost preternaturally aware that this was a part of her brother she had not seen before, or had seen but not noticed. She couldn’t say what he was looking at-Ships in the harbor? Gulls overhead? The jagged limestone karsts of the Broken Bay? She could only see his stillness, an absence of action so perfect, so absolute, that it seemed impossible he should ever move again. Then, after a very long time, he turned. When he saw her watching him, his burning eyes widened, the boyish grin slipped back onto his face, and he raced away, his Aedolians hollering protests as they gave chase.

It seemed, now, that that boy, the one who had raced and grinned, was gone. Almost a decade among the Shin had sanded the easy smile from his face. The dark hair was gone, shaved. Though his eyes still burned, the fire was distant now, cold, as the fire in her father’s eyes had been. Adare might not even have recognized him, were it not for that one day on the seaward wall a decade earlier. What she saw, when she looked at him now, was that stillness, that silence, that utterly unfathomable gaze.

“Your return to the city was not a matter of desire,” Kaden said finally. “It was a matter of necessity.”

She shook her head, weary and confused. “If we were going to be on the same side anyway, you could have decided to join forces a little earlier. Right when you got back to Annur, for instance. Instead of tearing each other apart, we could have been allies all this time, a united Malkeenian front.”

“A united Malkeenian front,” Kaden repeated, studying her. Adare felt like some rare bug beneath that gaze, a specimen carried in from the northern forests. “We’d need Valyn for that,” he went on after a moment. “Do you have any idea where he is?”

Adare’s heart lurched inside her. She forced her face to stay still. She kept her eyes on the waves, kept lazily kicking her feet in the water as the awful scene played out inside her mind all over again: Valyn appearing from nowhere on the roof of the tower in Andt-Kyl; Valyn stabbing Fulton, her last Aedolian; the hot blood pumping from beneath Fulton’s armor; the guardsman’s body so horribly heavy as Adare tried to lift him; the way the steel refused to come free; Valyn threatening il Tornja, threatening to kill the only general who could save Annur; the knife light in Adare’s hand, then buried in her brother’s side; her own screaming like a spike in her skull.…

Maybe there had been another choice, but she hadn’t seen it at the time. Without il Tornja, they would have been lost; the Urghul would have crushed all of Annur beneath the hooves of their horses months ago. Valyn had gone wild, had become half insane, judging from the look in his eyes. He’d been nothing at all like the boy Adare remembered; all the play was gone, all the joy and mischief, replaced by hate, and horror, and black, obliterating rage. And so she’d done what she needed to do to save the empire. Adare had been over her own reasoning scores of times, hundreds, since watching his limp body tumble from the tower’s top into the waves below. She could find no other choice-not then, not in the long months since. That knowledge did nothing to stop the nightmares.

“The last time I saw Valyn,” she replied, careful to meet Kaden’s eyes, to keep her voice level, not too loud, skirting the border of indifference, “he was a kid getting on a ship for the Qirin Islands.”

She forced herself to breathe in once, then out slowly. A lie, like a midwinter fire, was not a thing to rush.

Instead of responding, Kaden just watched her with those burning eyes. No emotion played over his face. He might have been looking at a blank wall, or a patch of ragged grass, but he kept looking, on and on, until Adare felt a sweat break out on the back of her neck.

He can’t know, she reminded herself. There’s no way he could know.

Those eyes continued to burn. She felt like a hare, some small, hot-blooded creature caught in a hunter’s snare.

What if someone saw? The voice inside her head sounded like Nira. Thousands of poor bastards in the battle just below-one of them might’a seen you put that knife between Valyn’s ribs.

For months, Adare had worried about just that. After all, a body falling from a tower wasn’t tremendously hard to miss. On the other hand, when Valyn stumbled from the tower, bleeding and reeling, his own knife stuck in his side, he’d fallen south, toward the lake, away from anyone watching. More importantly, the whole thing had played out while the battle was still raging in the streets below. All those close enough to see would have been fighting desperately, each man swinging a sword or dodging one. There had been no time, no space, for the study of Andt-Kyl’s limited skyline.

That, at any rate, was what Adare had told herself, and every day that went by without someone asking questions, demanding answers, raised in her the hope that Valyn’s death had gone unremarked, that it would remain undiscovered. It should have been a relief, that ongoing silence; the last thing she needed was a story of royal fratricide burning through the remnants of the empire. The absence of comment on the killing should have felt like a blessing; it did not.

History’s brutal truths-the wars and famines, tyrannies and genocides-were a burden shared among millions. The truth of that murder atop the tower, however, was Adare’s alone. The only witness, Ran il Tornja, was Csestriim, and for all his bonhomie and banter, incapable in his very bones of understanding what it had cost Adare to drive that knife between her brother’s ribs. The story was hers, as was the silence, and there were days when both weighed more than she thought she could bear.

She shook her head. “I wish that we knew where Valyn was. I’d trade half of Raalte for a loyal Kettral Wing.” She sharpened her gaze, fixed it on Kaden. “My spies told me that you might know where he is. That the two of you had some contact after he fled the Islands.”

“Spies?” Kaden asked, raising his brows.

“Yes,” Adare replied. “Spies. Men and women who pretended to be siding with you, but were really siding with me. Surely even your inept wreckage of a republic has spies.”

He nodded slowly. “What did they tell you, exactly?”

“That Valyn fled the Islands in disgrace. That he came to you. Maybe that he rescued you. Is it true?”

Kaden nodded again. “True enough. And our spies tell me that there was a Kettral Wing at the battle of Andt-Kyl. They say that a woman with red hair took charge before the arrival of the Army of the North. There were explosions. Kettral-style demolitions. People saw a girl in Kettral blacks who looked almost like a boy.” He watched her watching him. “The descriptions sound like soldiers on Valyn’s Wing. Gwenna Sharpe. Annick Frencha.”

Adare nodded. “I saw them from the tower,” she said, cleaving as close as possible to the truth. “No one knew who they were.”

“Not even il Tornja? He is the kenarang. The Kettral fall under his command.”

“That doesn’t mean he memorized the face of every cadet. And, in case your spies didn’t mention it, there was a battle that day. Il Tornja was trying to stop Long Fist, not play Guess the Kettral.”

“But there was no sign of Valyn? Up there in the north?”

Adare shook her head. “If he was there, I didn’t see him. Of course, there was a battle going on, tens of thousands of soldiers.…”

Kaden hesitated, as though considering whether or not to press the issue, then frowned. It was the only real expression she’d seen from him since he joined her on the dock.

“What about Long Fist?” he asked finally. “Was the Urghul chieftain at the battle?”

It was a new line of conversation; dangerous, but not as dangerous as the discussion of Valyn.

“No,” Adare replied. “A Kettral deserter named Balendin commanded the Urghul. A leach, evidently. He held up the bridges.”

“I know Balendin,” Kaden said quietly. “I almost killed him in the Bone Mountains. He is dangerous.”

Adare clamped down on her surprise. She had heard no account linking the leach to Kaden, but there was a lot she hadn’t heard in the madness of the months following her father’s death. She tried to imagine Kaden killing anyone, let alone a Kettral-trained leach. He wasn’t a warrior-that much was obvious at a glance-but those eyes … She shivered, then looked away, watching the ships swinging at anchor. Gulls gathered in the rigging. Every so often, one would scream, drop into a dive, then pull a fish, wet and writhing, from the waves.

“Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe the leach,” Adare replied after a pause. “He had his prisoners dragged out into the open, then torn limb from limb. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he helped.”

Kaden just nodded. “It is his well. He leaches off their terror of him, their hatred and revulsion, uses it to do … what he does.”

“I’ll tell you what he does,” Adare said, the memory fresh and horrible even after so many months. “He raises up whole bridges for his army to cross. He smashes down walls.” She shook her head. “He can squeeze his fingers from a hundred paces off, and a man’s head will explode inside his helmet.”

“It will only get worse,” Kaden replied. “As more people come to fear him, his power will grow.”

“Which is why il Tornja and I have been trying to stop the bastard. You’re down here playing mapmaker with those fucking idiots on the council, but everything is happening in the north, Kaden.”

“Everything?” he asked quietly. “I know about Balendin, but was Long Fist there?”

Adare hesitated, running her mind over the truth’s twisting fabric. It was all woven together: il Tornja’s identity and Valyn’s death, the truth about Long Fist and the truth about Nira and Oshi. Once you gave up one of those truths, it was hard to stop. One thread led to another, and pretty soon you could find you’d ripped apart the whole fabric, find it scattered in tatters around you.

“Adare,” Kaden said, eyes fixed on her. “I need to know what was going on up there. Horrible things could happen if we fail to act.”

“Horrible things have already happened. To me. To you. To Annur.” She waved a hand vaguely northward. “They are still fucking happening, Kaden. You haven’t been to the north. You haven’t see the flayed corpses left by the Urghul. The charred bodies of the children. The women taken apart slowly, limb by limb. Have you even been outside the ’Kent-kissing capital since you returned?”

He shook his head slowly. “The work is here.…”

“The work is everywhere. Bandits choke off half our roads. Fishermen have discovered they can make more coin as petty pirates. Trade is down. Theft is up. You’ve lost half of Hanno and Channary to the Waist tribes, if anything I’ve heard is true. The Manjari are poking their noses over the Ancaz. Freeport and the Federated Cities are murdering us on tariffs. The whole thing is coming apart at the seams.

“You think I’m reckless because I rode into Annur alone, unannounced, and burned down your idiotic hall?” She stabbed a finger at him. “What about you? You and your republic have been cautious, you’ve been measured, you debate for eight or nine days about whether or not to fly more flags from the walls of the Dawn Palace, and you are getting killed for it.”

She paused, breathing heavily, then corrected herself. “No. You aren’t getting killed. Other people, other Annurians, people who don’t have red walls to hide behind-they’re the ones getting killed for the decisions you make. Or fail to make.”

If he was taken aback by the tirade, it didn’t show. He gazed at her steadily, then nodded. “I understand your urgency. It will not save lives, however, to hurl ourselves heedlessly in one direction or another.”

Adare was already shaking her head. “This is like something our father would have said. He thought everything through-thought it through far better than you have-tried to figure all the angles, had a ’Kent-kissing plan, and what did he get for it? A blade between the ribs.” She bit down hard, partly to keep from saying anything else, partly to choke back her grief.

Kaden just sat there, hands folded in his lap, studying her as though she were a blue-fin striper dumped out on the dock to flop herself to death. The mention of Sanlitun’s murder brought no expression to his face.

“It was your general who killed him,” he said finally, quietly. “Ran il Tornja killed our father.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that?”

He blinked. “It’s hard to know what to think.”

“Yes, Kaden. It is hard. But that doesn’t mean you can just quit doing it.”

“I haven’t quit.”

“Is that right?” Adare demanded. “What is it you’ve been doing then, these past nine months? You destroyed an empire that brought peace and prosperity for hundreds of years-I’ll grant you that-and then what?”

Someone else, anyone else, would have responded to the challenge. Nira would have slapped her. Lehav would have argued with her. Ran il Tornja would have laughed at her, and Ran il Tornja was one of the ’Kent-kissing Csestriim. Kaden just shook his head.

“The situation is more difficult than you understand.”

“And what makes you think,” she demanded, bringing her voice under control, “that you have any idea what I understand?”

“There are other threats than the Urghul. More dire threats.”

“Of course there are,” she spat. “I just got done listing half of them. There are so many threats that the Urghul sometimes actually seem quaint. At least they’re just a bloodthirsty horde with a fairly predictable plan to smash through the Army of the North and put the entire empire to the sword. It’s really a somewhat old-fashioned notion, if you think about it.”

“The Urghul may be a simple, bloodthirsty horde,” Kaden replied, “but the man commanding them is not. And your general, Ran il Tornja-he is not simply a general.”

A cold prickling ran up Adare’s spine. She started to respond, then stopped. Just like that, they had returned to the dangerous ground of half-truths and qualified revelations. Kaden met her eyes. There was no eagerness there, no uncertainty. She couldn’t see anything at all in those blazing irises. She had expected this, had planned for it, but she had not realized it would come so abruptly.

She glanced over her shoulder. The Aedolians were a hundred paces off, standing with their backs turned at the end of the dock. She lowered her voice anyway. “Ran il Tornja is Csestriim,” she said.

Kaden nodded. “I know. Which means the child you bore him is also Csestriim, at least in part.”

He delivered the words quietly, almost indifferently, as though he were a servant murmuring a message of little consequence. It took all Adare’s restraint not to hit him.

“I did not bear him a child,” she hissed, voice a blade honed against her rage. “Having a son was not something I did for il Tornja. Sanlitun is not some trinket, some prize that I produced from between my legs to please the great general. My child is my own.”

Kaden didn’t even blink in the face of her fury. “And yet your son links il Tornja more closely to the throne.”

“Il Tornja doesn’t want the fucking throne.”

“Not as an end in itself, perhaps, but as a means, a tool. He is Csestriim, Adare.”

Slowly, painfully, she shackled her pounding heart, choked back the words flooding up into her throat, forced herself to be still. Waves rustled beneath the dock like something alive and tireless. She watched her brother, trying to gauge her next play from the shifting fire in his eyes. After a moment, she decided to throw the dice. “As is the one you call Kiel.”

“He is.”

For a while they just sat, as though the truths they had both just uttered were too large to move past. The waves were growing colder as the sun sagged behind the palace, and Adare pulled her feet from the water, hugging her knees to her chest. An east wind had picked up, tossing her hair in her face. She shivered.

“Il Tornja warned me that Kiel would be here,” she said finally. “He told me not to trust him.”

“And Kiel told me not to trust il Tornja.”

Adare spread her hands. “Sounds like an impasse.”

“Not necessarily,” Kaden replied slowly. “Beyond the opinions of the two Csestriim, there are the raw facts to consider.”

“Facts,” Adare replied warily, “have a way of twisting with the teller.”

“We know this much, at least: the general you rely on so heavily is the same one who murdered our father, who sent close to a hundred Aedolians to kill me, who ordered a Kettral Wing to kill Valyn before he even left the Islands.” Kaden shook his head. “If we’re trying to decide who to trust, it seems to me we might want to look at what they’ve been up to, at what they have done to earn that trust.”

Adare marshaled her thoughts. She’d known all this, of course, but it was different to hear it from someone else, to hear the bloody words spoken aloud.

“There were reasons.”

Kaden didn’t move. “There are always reasons.”

Far out in the bay, a ship tacked against the wind, heeling over to cut across the waves, first one way, then the next, approaching its invisible goal so obliquely that even after watching it for a while, Adare couldn’t say for sure where it was going. After a long time she turned back to her brother.

She needed to tell him something-that much was clear. He already knew about il Tornja, knew that she knew her own general was a murderer. If she revealed nothing else, none of her reasons for everything she’d done, he would go on believing all the things he so obviously believed: that she had seized the throne out of some dumb lust for power, that she’d made common cause with il Tornja purely to consolidate that power, that she cared about her own station instead of the welfare of Annur. If he believed all that, there would be no working with him, and she needed to work with him, with the entire council, if they were to have any hope of saving anyone. She needed to tell him something, to explain. The question was: how much?

“When I took the Unhewn Throne,” she said finally, quietly, “I thought you were dead.”

“I don’t care about the throne, Adare.”

“If I’d known you were still alive, that you were going to return to the city, I wouldn’t have made that move. I wouldn’t have had to, but it had been months since Father’s funeral, months with no word, and if I didn’t take the throne, il Tornja would have.”

“I don’t care about the throne,” he said again.

She studied him, tried to see past those eyes to something human, something true.

“Then why did you destroy Annur? If you don’t care about the throne, why work so hard to keep me from sitting on it?”

“It wasn’t to stop you. It was to stop il Tornja. Annur is his … his weapon, and I could not let him bring it to bear.”

“Did it occur to you,” she demanded, “that I might have already taken il Tornja in hand?”

“Taken him in hand?” Kaden raised his brows. “You slept with him, and then, with his support, you declared yourself Emperor. Not only did you fail to take him in hand, you confirmed him in his post, and then you joined your own military force to his. If you’ve been anything but compliant, I haven’t seen any evidence of it. The fact that you know he is Csestriim, that you know he murdered our father … that just makes it worse.”

She wanted to hit him, to knock some expression into those expressionless eyes.

“Do you think there has been a day since I learned the truth,” she demanded with a growl, “when I didn’t dream of opening his throat?”

Kaden met her glare. “Then why haven’t you?”

“Because sometimes it is necessary to suppress our immediate instincts, Kaden. Sometimes it is necessary to make sacrifices, to accept, if only for a time, the most loathsome situations.” She shook her head, suddenly weary. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to always speak the first words that came to mind. It would be a wonderful luxury to associate only with the honest and the upright. It would be so, so satisfying never to compromise, never to make decisions that led you to hate yourself.”

She stared out to the east, to where the evening wind was whipping up the waves. Behind her, the council chamber would still be smoldering, but sooner or later, that clean east wind, salt-sharp and cool, would scour away the last of the smoke.

“Following your own heart might be a nice way to live,” she said quietly, “but it’s a disastrous way to rule.”

Kaden blinked. “Fair enough,” he said after a pause, then cocked his head to the side. “How did you learn the truth about il Tornja?”

“He made mistakes,” Adare replied bluntly.

Kaden frowned. Those burning eyes went distant, as though he were studying something beyond the horizon. “That seems unlikely,” he replied finally. “It is much more likely that whatever you know about him, he wants you to know.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Because I’m just some stupid slut? Because I couldn’t possibly have any insight or agency of my own?”

“Because he is Csestriim, Adare. He is smarter than any of us, and he has had thousands of years to plan. He was their greatest general.…”

“You don’t need to lecture me on his brilliance,” she replied grimly. “You forget that I was on the tower in Andt-Kyl. I saw him command the battle. I know what he can do. I kept him alive because of that brilliance, because I know just how badly we need it.”

Kaden raised his brows. “And you still think that you outsmarted him?”

“I think that even Csestriim can run into bad luck.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning there are other factors in play here. Factors unknown to you.”

“Tell me.”

She barked a laugh. “Just like that, eh?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t fucking trust you, Kaden. That’s why not. The first thing you did when you got back to Annur was to destroy it. You’re trying to stop il Tornja, or so you claim, but Ran il Tornja is the only one actually defending Annur.”

“He is not defending Annur,” Kaden said quietly. “He’s trying to kill Long Fist.”

“At the moment, it amounts to much the same thing.”

“It would, if Long Fist were just an Urghul chieftain.”

And so, after a long diversion, they were back to Long Fist. Adare had never even seen the man, and yet he seemed to be everywhere, the answer to every riddle, the fire beneath every column of smoke, the bloody battle at the end of every endless march. All paths led to him. Every scream could be traced back to his bright knives. Underneath every name she uttered-Kaden, il Tornja, Valyn, Balendin-underneath or above, she seemed to hear the name of the Urghul chieftain echoing.

“And you think he is what?”

Kaden took a deep breath, held it a moment, then blew it out slowly. “Long Fist is Meshkent.”

Adare stared. The small hairs on her arm, on the back of her neck, stood up at once. The evening was cool, not cold, but she suppressed a shiver. Il Tornja had been saying the same thing for months, but she had never believed him, not really. “What makes you say that?”

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “You knew.”

“I knew it was a possibility.”

“Il Tornja told you.”

She nodded carefully.

“And did he tell you why he was so eager to see Long Fist destroyed?”

“For the same reason that I am,” she said. “For the same reason that you should be. To protect Annur.”

“Why would he want to protect Annur? He fought to destroy humanity, Adare. He nearly succeeded. Why would he care about one of our empires?”

“Because it is not our empire,” she replied. The words were bitter, but she said them anyway. “It is his. He built it. He takes care of it.”

“In the same way that a soldier cares for his sword.”

“You keep saying that,” she said, “but you never get around to explaining how he’s planning to use that sword.”

“To kill Meshkent.”

“Why?”

Kaden hesitated, then looked away.

Adare blew out an angry breath. “If you expect me to believe you, Kaden, if you expect me to help you, then you have to give me something. Why are you so concerned about the health of Long Fist or Meshkent or whoever the fuck it happens to be? The bastard is putting our people to the sword and the fire, he’s leaping around through these ’Shael-spawned gates-your gates, these kenta-lighting fires at every corner of Annur. I’m not sure il Tornja’s reasons even matter, as long as he stops him.”

For the first time, Kaden’s eyes widened. Something she’d said, finally, had made it past that shield he used for a face.

“Long Fist is using the kenta?” he asked, a new note in his voice, one she couldn’t place. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t know it. It sounds impossible to me, but il Tornja insists it’s true.”

Kaden was shaking his head, as though resisting the claim.

“I know you thought you and your monks were special,” she said, “but if il Tornja’s right, Long Fist is a god. Evidently gods can pass through the gates.”

“It’s not the-”

Kaden clamped his mouth shut.

“What?” Adare pressed.

It had seemed, for just a moment, that he was about to talk to her, to really talk, without the evasions and omissions that had marred the rest of their conversation. It had seemed as though they were about to push past some unseen barrier, some awful, invisible wall that stood between them even in the limpid evening air. It had seemed, for just a heartbeat, that he was about to speak, not as one politician to another, but as a brother to a sister, as someone who understood the weight and texture of her loss, the awful, echoing emptiness, someone who shared it. Then the moment passed.

“It’s surprising,” he said brusquely. “Although it makes sense. The violence on the borders is too perfect, too well coordinated to be random.”

Adare stared at him, willing him to say more, but he did not say more.

“Nothing about it makes sense,” she snapped finally. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be the truth.”

Kaden nodded slowly.

“So,” Adare said, breathing heavily, “are you still going to insist we should be worrying about il Tornja and not Long Fist?”

“It’s starting to seem,” Kaden replied, “that we need to worry about everyone.”

“Well, I’ve done more than worry,” Adare said. “I’ve got il Tornja collared. Under control.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you when I trust you.”

And suddenly, it didn’t seem so impossible, trust. Kaden had known more than she realized. Her lies hadn’t needed to be as wide as she had expected, nor so deep. The gap between them was just that, a gap, not a chasm. Intarra knew she could use an ally, one who wasn’t immortal or half insane.

“Kaden,” she said quietly. “We need to be honest with each other.”

He held her eyes and nodded slowly. “I agree.”

“You’re my brother. We can figure this out together.”

Again he nodded, but there was nothing behind the nod, no true agreement.

“I wish Valyn were here,” he said after a pause.

It didn’t seem like Kaden, like this new Kaden, to wish for anything. He was a monk now, and his monk’s training appeared to have put him beyond wishing, in the way that fish were beyond breathing. On the other hand, the Shin couldn’t have changed him entirely. He had confided in her. It was a start.

“Me, too,” she said.

It was the truth. Scholars and philosophers were forever lauding truth, holding it up as a sort of divine perfection available to man. The truth in those old texts was always shining, glowing, golden. As though they didn’t know, not any of them, that some truths were jagged as a rusty blade, horrible, serrated, irremovable, lodged forever in the insubstantial substance of the soul.