The Last Mortal Bond

21

“Look, Gwenna,” Jak said quietly, “I know you didn’t want me along for this.”

She took a deep breath. As usual, she could smell his nerves, as though the skin had been flayed right off, leaving his raw flesh open to the salt air. She closed her eyes, hoping the darkness might blot out his anxiety, but she could still hear him picking at a ragged fingernail, the quick, convulsive motion a counterpoint to his shallow breathing, to his fast-beating heart. She opened her eyes again, staring up through the leaves of the mangroves at the low cumulus forming up to the southeast. Rain coming. Probably thunder, too. It would have been nice to bust out the long lens and get the scouting over with, but the morning sun was still too low in the east. Using the long lens now would be little better than flashing a mirror at Rallen’s hastily built fortress. There was nothing to do but lie still, wait for the sun to climb higher in the sky, and try to ignore the fear that seemed to twist Quick Jak a little tighter with every passing heartbeat.

She considered falling asleep for a few hours. She’d been swimming and fighting almost every moment since the Widow’s Wish slipped beneath the waves, and she could feel her muscles getting heavier, her mind growing more muddled. There was no sleeping, however, with Jak a few feet away, gnawing his nails down to the bloody quick, and besides, if she didn’t say something to take his mind off the situation, he seemed likely to fall to pieces before they even started the swim back.

Should have sent him with Talal, she thought. The leach knew how to talk to everyone, even a washout, but Talal was with Qora and Annick on a different craggy, bird-shit-stained rock a mile to the east, scouting Rallen’s fortress from a separate angle. Which left the talking to her. She took a deep breath.

“It’s not personal,” she said, hoping that would be enough, that they could both just leave it at that and get some shut-eye.

Instead she could hear Jak turning to face her. “I know what it is, Gwenna. You saw what happened back in Hook. You saw me freeze up in that fight.”

“You weren’t even in the fight,” she replied, regretting the words even as she said them.

She expected resentment or rage. When he spoke, however, she heard only resignation in his voice. “I know. It’s just … Never mind.”

For a moment she lay still, her eyes closed. Never mind. It was a plausible break in the conversation, a reasonable end point. Maybe if she kept her mouth shut they could be done with all the chatter. Waves scraped over the stones a few paces away, soft, implacable fingers clawing at the shore.

Never was much good at keeping my mouth shut, she thought, then rolled onto one elbow, blew out an exasperated breath, and turned to face the flier.

“The thing is,” she said, unable to blunt her glare, “I do mind.”

He didn’t turn away, but she could see him swallow quickly, heavily, as though holding her eyes required an effort of will. It was sad and it was fucking irritating. Quick Jak didn’t look like a coward; he looked just as much Kettral as anyone else on the Islands-more so than most, actually. The shaved head, the muscle laid in carved slabs over his chest and shoulders, the scars cut into his forearms by half a dozen training accidents … He sure looked the part, and the bastard could swim.

It was two miles from the caves on Irsk to the craggy island of Skarn, where Rallen had built his fortress, two open miles unprotected by reef or shoreline, exposed to the huge swells rolling in off the ocean to the northeast. Kettral could make the swim easily, but then, Jak wasn’t Kettral. Gwenna had seen him freeze up back on Hook, and she had visions of hauling a panicked, thrashing washout through the waves all the way out and all the way back. She need not have worried. Jak’s stroke was so clean and languid it looked lazy. It was also strong as Hull and viciously efficient. Within a few hundred paces, Gwenna was working hard to keep up, gritting her teeth and measuring her breath while Jak sliced through the waves casually, only lifting his mouth to breathe every sixth stroke. Going out fast, she told herself. Trying to prove something. Halfway to Skarn, however, when Jak showed no sign of slowing, she was forced to admit that the pace, which seemed half a sprint to her, wasn’t even straining him. He might be a coward, but he was a fucking strong coward.

She’d tried to keep up for a few hundred more strokes, battling her way up the steep green sides of the swells, straining to make the most of the downslope as the ocean slid beneath her. She wasn’t about to call out-not that he could hear her anyway-but finally he paused, turned back toward her, and treaded water while she caught up. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Tough passage,” he said. Gwenna could feel her jaw tightening, but there was no hint of smugness in his voice. No sign of triumph. “These crossed swells,” he said, nodding toward the northeast, “really slow things down.” He hesitated a moment, then pointed at the inflated bladder Gwenna had been dragging behind her. “I’m happy to pull that. If you want.”

She was about to refuse. Jak had his own float bag filled with dry blacks, weapons, and a spyglass. Gwenna was used to hauling her own shit. She was about to snap something about not needing a washout to take care of her gear for her, but Jak continued before she could speak.

“This is something I’m good at, at least,” he said quietly. “It’s a way I can actually help.”

With an effort, she’d swallowed both her pride and her irritation. The flier might be a washout and a coward, but here he was all the same, in the middle of the ’Kent-kissing ocean, swimming toward a fort full of the same people who had been hunting him for months. That had to be worth something. Besides, something in his voice, some note she recognized but couldn’t quite name, stilled her objection. She’d been lost since leaving the Eyrie, baffled and utterly out of her depth. She knew what it was like to want, want desperately, some job that you understood, some task that you’d actually trained for. One of her most confident moments at the battle of Andt-Kyl had been diving beneath the logjam, lit starshatter in hand. She’d been certain she was going to die, had known it in her very marrow, but she’d also been certain that she could blow the bridge, that that one problem, at least, was something she could solve.

“Thanks,” she grunted, loosening the knot around her waist, then handing him the bitter end of the cord. To her surprise, he’d smiled in the starlight.

When they finally climbed clear of the water, out onto the barnacled rocks skirting a small atoll a few hundred paces west of Skarn, he hauled in the bag, untied the knot, passed it over to her without a word, and turned to his own gear, fishing out dry clothes. They’d made the swim over naked-no point struggling in soaked wool when you had a float bag to pull-and Gwenna snuck a glance at him while he was busy with his gear. He was breathing more deeply than he had at the start of the swim, the wings of the kettral inked across his back rising and falling with each breath. When he glanced over his shoulder at her, she realized she was staring, pulled her eyes away hastily, then cursed herself silently for the reaction. It wasn’t as though she’d never seen a man naked before. The tropics were hot, water was wet. The Kettral trained to swim in their blacks, of course, but most of the year it made more sense to swim with no clothes. Thigh-slapping cocks and bare asses were part of the job, just like the sight of blood was part of the job. And yet here she was peeking and blushing like a first-year cadet.

She straightened up, ignoring her own nakedness, and studied the man openly.

“Where you’d learn to swim like that?”

He met her eyes, then looked away with a half shrug. “It was something to do. Over on Arim.”

She frowned. “I thought they didn’t let you off the island.”

“We can swim,” he said, pulling on his pants. “Could swim,” he said, cinching the belt tight as he corrected himself. “Up to five hundred paces offshore. I circled the island every day, once in the morning, once in the evening.”

Gwenna stared. “That’s got to be what, ten miles a day?”

He nodded. “A little less.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not Kettral. It’s not like you’re going to need to fly missions. It’s not like people were going to die if you didn’t swim fast enough. What the fuck possessed you to spend half of every day grinding through garbage yardage in rings around Arim?”

He stared at her. Dawn was just starting to bruise the eastern sky, but the night wind scudding in over the waves was still cool on her wet skin. A shiver ran through her.

Finally he gave half a shrug. “It was something to do.” His voice was barely louder than the waves. “A way to forget about being locked up.”

“If you didn’t want to be on Arim,” she said, the words pouring out of her before she could call them back, “then why did you quit?”

He watched her a heartbeat longer, then shook his head, turning away without a word, pulling his blacks over his head. She could smell the shame on him, warm and cloying in the cool breeze, and after a moment she, too, turned away, shrugging into her own clothes, angry without knowing why.

They took up a position in the verge of the scrubby mangroves just before dawn, settled into the vegetation, laid out the long lens, which Gwenna planned to use later, and the weapons, which she didn’t, then watched the sun rise without saying a word. She’d almost managed to forget about the conversation on the rocks, had almost bullied her squirming mind into something resembling sleep, and then he’d started up again with this shit about knowing that she didn’t want him along. Well, if he was determined to talk, she’d fucking talk.

“You’re right,” she went on, more hotly than she’d intended. “I mind that you’re here, not because I don’t like you, but because I can’t rely on you.”

“You don’t know anything about me, Gwenna.”

“I know that you washed out during the Trial,” she said, holding up a finger. “I know that you froze in the alleyway over on Hook, that you were about to let your partner die because you were too scared to make a play.”

“Two moments,” he replied quietly, “out of twenty-four years.”

“The moments are all that matter, Jak. People talk about lifetimes, but lifetimes are built out of moments. The decisions we make, the ones that matter, the ones that get people killed or keep them alive…” She snapped her fingers. “They’re that fast.”

The memory of that first Annurian legionary she’d killed flooded through her, hot and awful and undimmed even after nearly a year. How long had it taken to decide she needed to kill him, to decide how and then to do it, to plunge that ridiculous stick through his eye as thousands and thousands of Urghul roared all around her? A heartbeat. Maybe two.

“It doesn’t matter what you do in between those moments,” she said, pressing ahead despite the hard wall of his silence. “It doesn’t matter if you swim all day, or if you’re kind to your aging mother, or any of the rest of that shit. What matters, when you’re Kettral, is what you do”-she stabbed a stiffened finger straight down into the stone-“right now. Right now. Right now.”

He watched her a moment, then rolled onto his back, staring up through the leaves.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Well, do you?”

“Of course I do. It’s why I’m not Kettral.”

Gwenna had clenched her hands into fists. With an effort, she relaxed them, then let her head drop back against a root.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s fine. Unless I’ve fucked up, and bad, we’re not going to be fighting anyone today. We’re just here to look at the birds, to learn what we can about what they’ve got and how we can take it.”

That was why Jak had come in the first place. He knew about kettral, understood them better than anyone else left on the Islands. Gwenna could count the ’Kent-kissing things, could probably come up with a tally of the healthy and the badly injured, but that was about it. Before arriving at any plan worth the name, she’d need to know more: Which birds were the fastest? Which were the older and more experienced? If it came to a fight between the kettral, which were the strongest, the most likely to triumph?

According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius with birds. Laith had said the man was the finest flier he’d ever seen, and Laith hadn’t thought anyone was a finer flier than Laith. Maybe it was true, and even if it wasn’t, Jak was what she had. Everyone could contribute something. That was the point of working in a team. The washout flier might still prove useful, even crucial. Gwenna just had to be careful to keep him out of a fight, to keep him well clear of any situation where he might lose his tenuous cool and get someone killed.

By the time the sun finally climbed high enough to use the long lens without signaling everyone on Rallen’s island, Jak had been quiet for hours, lying silently on his back, staring open-eyed into the thick-leaved canopy above. Gwenna had failed to fall asleep. Usually she could shut her eyes and be out in a few heartbeats. Certainly, the swim over had left her plenty tired. The morning’s conversation, though, had irritated her. She kept going over and over what Jak had said, trying to understand how someone with a strong body and keen mind could be so useless, so resigned to his failures. That she wanted to like him only made it worse. She felt betrayed without even knowing the man, and it was with a long sigh of relief that she finally rolled onto her stomach, extended the wooden tube of the long lens, and began the scouting she’d come to do.

The main Eyrie compound-the command buildings, the barracks, the various training rings, the harbor, docks, and associated storehouses, the mess hall, Lucky Fucks’ Row-almost everything that mattered to the day-to-day operation of the Kettral was on Qarsh, miles to the southwest. Rallen, however, had opted to move his base of operations off the island. It wasn’t that hard to understand why. Qarsh was the largest island in the archipelago-nearly three miles across at the widest-and also the gentlest. Instead of crenellated limestone dropping straight into the sea, Qarsh had plenty of coves and beaches, mangrove stands and offshore reefs to break the worst of the swells. It was a great place to live but a nightmare to defend. Before the Eyrie ripped out its own guts, of course, defense hadn’t been much of an issue. Anyone attacking would be attacking from somewhere else, and the regular Kettral patrols could see them at least two days out.

Rallen, however, was fighting a different sort of war. His enemies were already on the Qirins, hidden away in cellars on Hook, secreted in the tangles of jungle vines, lurking undiscovered in the endless warren of Hull’s Hole. And then there was the question of numbers. On the day Gwenna fled the Islands with Valyn and the Wing, there had been hundreds of active-duty Kettral, half as many cadets, and at least that many retired vets living out their last years down by the harbor-more than enough for the minimal guard duty required. If Manthe and Hobb were right, however, Rallen didn’t have more than thirty or forty soldiers at his disposal, not nearly enough to guard the whole perimeter of Qarsh.

And so he was here. Gwenna twisted the long lens, focusing it on the island half a mile to the east. Skarn. No linguistic relation, she hoped, to the beasts living down in the Hole, but the name put her on edge all the same. So did the ’Kent-kissing terrain.

“Well, this is unfortunate,” she said, eyeing the cliffs that climbed straight out of the water on every side.

“You’ve never seen it before?” Jak asked.

“Of course I’ve seen it. I just never thought I’d have to attack it.”

The truth was, she’d never paid the island much mind. It lay well clear of Qarsh and Hook, off the usual swimming and smallboat circuits, and while she’d sailed around it dozens of times, flown over it twice that many, the only people who spent any time on the island were the fliers, both active and retired. The fliers, and the birds themselves.

The kettral built their nests and raised their young over on the eastern end of Qarsh, where the ground was relatively flat. Once they matured, however, following some animal instinct no one at the Eyrie fully understood, they spread their wings and left the gentle island, searching, evidently, for something more … vertical. There wasn’t anywhere in the Islands more vertical than Skarn.

“Are there any harbors or beaches?” Gwenna asked, sweeping the lens back and forth over the overhanging limestone.

Jak shook his head. “Not really. The only thing you can reach from the water is a little rocky shoulder on the far side. It’s underwater at high tide, though.”

“Can you get from there to the top of the cliffs?”

“No.”

“So how did Rallen get in the supplies to build the ’Kent-kissing thing?”

She studied the fortress, or what she could see of it, at least. On level ground, Rallen’s fort wouldn’t have been much of a fort. It looked more like a series of stables strung along behind a large stone barn, the various structures connected by a wall no more than twice Gwenna’s height. The trouble was, the fort wasn’t set on level ground. The whole compound perched at the very brink of the cliff. The limestone crag on which it stood was so steep and high-at least forty paces, overhung for the bottom third-as to render the miserable walls at the top pointless, even ludicrous. It was as though the builders, having thrown together the hall and outbuildings, felt compelled to put up some sort of wall, all the time understanding the pointlessness of the gesture.

“Most of it’s rock,” Jak replied. “Quarried right there on the island. There was a crane to haul up the heavy supplies, the mast from an old ship anchored in the stone with a block and tackle at the end. That’s how they hoisted up the timber for roof beams and the rest. Rallen had it torn down when the building was done.”

“Why in Hull’s name,” Gwenna wondered aloud, “would you rip out your only means of resupply?”

“Because he’s careful. The crane was a weakness. A potential entry point.”

Gwenna put down the lens, then turned to stare at him. “Not if you remember to pull up the rope when you’re done with it!”

Even as she was saying the words, however, she was thinking of ways she could have used that recommissioned mast. Annick could have shot an arrow over it, for one thing. Attach a light enough cord to that arrow-an unbraided thread of Liran rope, maybe-and you could use it as a pilot to drag up something more substantial. Then it was a simple matter of-

“Whatever else he is, Rallen’s Kettral,” Jak said, as though reading her thoughts. “He’s lived on these islands at least forty years, and he knows what the Kettral can do.”

“But there aren’t any Kettral left.”

Jak met her gaze. “Even the washouts have some training. We’re not the real thing, Rallen knows that, but we’re not completely useless.”

Gwenna nodded slowly, then turned the long lens back to the fort.

“So the small buildings are storage and barracks, the large thing, that lopsided pile that looks like some farmer’s first attempt at a barn, is mess and command?”

Jak shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never been up there. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”

“Who has seen it?”

“None of us. Not from the inside. When Rallen came for us on Arim, when he offered us all a second chance, we took boats over to Qarsh. Set up in the barracks there.”

“You must have known he was building something out here.”

“We did. He said it was the first in a series of fortifications to make the Islands safer, more defensible, more secure. Flew in a couple dozen craftsmen from over on Hook to build the place.”

“Craftsmen,” Gwenna snorted, peering through the long lens once more. “That’s a generous term for anyone living over on Hook. Where are they now? Can we talk to them?”

“They’re dead,” Jak replied quietly. “When construction was finished, Rallen had them tied, ankles and elbows, and threw them off the cliff.”

Gwenna shook her head slowly. “That sick fuck.”

“You see why we have to stop him?” Jak asked.

“What I don’t see is why you kept following him in the first place.”

“He was Kettral.…”

Gwenna waved away the explanation. “I know. He showed up. He offered you a second chance. Fine. But when he started throwing civilians off cliffs? That didn’t clue you all in to the fact that he was aiming at something other than the preservation of Annurian justice?”

“Of course it did.” A new note in Jak’s voice made her put down the lens again. She looked over to find his hands clenched into fists, knuckles gone bone-white, as though he were trying to throttle something.

I finally made him angry, she realized. About fucking time.

“Of course we knew it,” Jak said again. “A lot of us were already planning to stop him, to stop helping, at least. That’s why we refused his personal pledge of fealty the next day.”

Gwenna watched the anger wither. The flier’s eyes had gone wide and distant as he relived the slaughter.

“And that’s when he killed you.”

Jak nodded. “We didn’t know it, but he’d already stocked this place. The munitions were here, his most trusted lieutenants were here…”

“And the birds were here,” she finished quietly.

Jak nodded again, staring, rapt, into the past. That obsession, in its own way, was just as dangerous as what they faced atop the cliff. The flier was brittle enough when he wasn’t reliving the blood and screaming of Rallen’s purge. If he was going to survive, he needed to look forward, not back, and Gwenna needed him to survive.

“So where are they?” she asked, waving a hand at the cliffs. “The birds?”

For a few heartbeats he didn’t respond. Then, slowly, his eyes refocused, found hers. She could still smell the fear on him, but there was something else there, too, something in those clenched knuckles, in the set of his jaw. Stubbornness, she thought. Not the same thing as courage, not by a long shot, but it would have to do.

“There,” Jak said, pointing. “And there. And there. In those shallow caves, mostly.”

Gwenna studied the cliff for a moment. She could make out the hollows in the rock, huge holes carved from the stone by age after age of rain and prying wind. With the sun so bright overhead, however, she could barely make out anything inside. She put the long lens to her eye, studying the most obvious of the features. She could see the blocky shapes of the limestone wall in back, but no sign of a bird.

“It’s empty.”

“It’s daytime,” Jak replied. “They’ll all be out, flying missions or hunting.”

Hunting. That was a sight you weren’t likely to forget. Early in their training, each class of cadets was hauled over to Qel, one of the only islands in the chain capable of supporting livestock. Sheep, goats, and cows grazed on the stiff, thick-bladed island grass-hundreds of animals scattered over a few square miles. It was a pleasant enough scene, a warmer, more tropical version of the kind of pastoral landscape you could find anywhere from Sia to north of the Neck. Until the kettral showed up.

It was impossible to understand the birds, to really appreciate what they could do, without seeing them stoop from a few hundred paces up, fall on a full-grown cow like a boulder of avian feathers and flesh. Gwenna had almost puked on her blacks the first time she saw it. She’d grown up around hawks and falcons, of course, had seen them take field mice and squirrels caught out between the trees. The sight of kettral savaging entire cows, however, the vision of them rending to bloody ribbons beasts that weighed ten times what she did herself … that was a vision she’d been trying to put out of her mind during every flight for the past ten years.

“The timing is good,” Jak was saying. His voice reeled her back to the present. “The birds are hungry when they wake up. They usually hunt in the morning, take a little time lazing on the thermals while they digest, then come back here for some sport.”

“I thought the hunting was the sport,” Gwenna said, thinking of sheep carved in half, split cleanly from spine to sternum as though with a massive ax.

Jak shook his head. “Killing a cow on open ground? That takes about as much effort for the kettral as it would take you to open a coconut with one of your blades. The sport is between the birds themselves.”

Even as he spoke, he pointed south. Five kettral were gliding in, carried on some invisible shelf of wind, wings spread wide, pinions silently rippling. They might have been normal birds, small as Gwenna’s outstretched thumb, until you realized they were still miles out and hundreds of paces up, that their scale was a trick of the eye, an untruth of the mind misreading the distance, a lie that made them, momentarily, a little easier to believe.

“Only five?” Gwenna asked.

“Six,” Jak said, pointing up at the bird circling the rocky island in a high, silent spiral. “Rallen keeps at least one in the air at all times. Flying guard patrol for his fort.”

Gwenna glanced up, then back at the approaching birds. “Even six. There must have been scores here a year ago.…”

“Eighty-seven,” Jak replied. “There were eighty-seven before the Eyrie killed them.”

The words were blunt, bitter. Gwenna could smell his grief. It made her mad.

“You realize,” she said, forcing herself to keep her voice low, “that there were people killed, too. That Kettral Wings were flying those creatures.…”

“There are plenty more people,” Jak replied grimly. “More than enough people.” He gestured toward the incoming birds. “For all anyone knows, these are the last of the kettral.”

Gwenna stared at him. She’d never considered that before. The destruction of the Eyrie itself, the mutual slaughter of nearly everyone she’d ever really known, that fact had eclipsed everything else. The birds were important, but important in the same way as munitions: valuable weaponry to be salvaged before it fell into unsavory hands. She’d never considered the kettral deaths themselves, never realized that the vicious battle on the Islands could well have scrubbed the creatures out of existence.

“There,” Jak said, pointing at the two birds in the lead. “Sente’ril and Sente’ra. Young birds from the same clutch. We’ve seen them before, flying patrols.…”

Gwenna glanced at the two birds, then scanned past them to a group of three birds trailing a little behind, her eye drawn to the center of the group, a mottled female with the slightest stutter in her wingbeat. “Holy Hull,” she breathed quietly. “She made it. Out of all of us, she was the first one back.”

Jak glanced over at her, reading the situation. “Your bird?”

Gwenna nodded. “Suant’ra.”

“I remember her,” the flier said. “She was barely fledged when I … left for Arim.”

“Laith raised her,” Gwenna said, the memory of the dead flier like a shard of glass lodged under her skin. “He trained her.”

“I remember him, too,” Jak said slowly. “Good flier. Reckless.”

Gwenna coughed up a laugh. “He was reckless, all right.” She shook her head, as though the motion might shake clear the thought of her slaughtered friend. “Always thought nothing could kill him. At least not while he was mounted up on ’Ra.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got killed,” Gwenna replied, her voice flat. “Doing something stupid.”

Jak glanced over at her quickly, then looked away, back to the approaching kettral. “And to her?” he asked quietly, gesturing.

“She took an injury fighting the Flea’s bird up in the Bone Mountains. Something in her wing. Bad, Laith said. She couldn’t carry us, and we were a seventy-foot target in the middle of the steppe as long as we stayed with her, so Valyn sent her south.”

Valyn, too. Another one who would never come back to the Islands.

Jak glanced through the long lens for half a heartbeat, then nodded. “Looks like a patagial tear. She’s lucky it healed up enough to fly.”

Gwenna stared at ’Ra again. The wingbeat stutter was almost invisible, but she remembered Laith running his hands over his bird for what seemed like half the day, then coming up with the same diagnosis.

“You can tell that from this distance?” she asked.

Jak nodded slowly, half his attention on the remaining birds. “I was good at all of this,” he said, voice little more than a murmur. “Just not the fear…”

Gwenna shifted uncomfortably on the stone. It was bad enough to be a coward; you didn’t have to admit it. Didn’t have to say the words openly.

“What about the others?” she asked.

“Kei’ta and Shura’ka,” he replied after a moment. “I haven’t seen either of them on patrols.”

“Why not?” Gwenna asked. “Why would Rallen hold those two in reserve?”

“Maybe he’s not. We’re in the Hole, mostly. They could be flying every other day, and I might have just missed them.” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing I came. We have to get this right.”

Gwenna turned at the unexpected note of determination in his voice. “Meaning what, exactly?”

Jak frowned. “We have, at most, three fliers.”

“Including you.”

“Yes,” he replied, meeting her stare. “Including me. We’re only going to have one shot at this, and we can’t take all the birds. When the time comes, we need to make sure we get the right ones, the top flight.”

“Top flight?”

He nodded. “Some birds are better than others. Like soldiers. Faster or stronger. More tenacious.”

Gwenna nodded slowly. She’d heard plenty of chatter in the mess hall over the years, men and women comparing kettral, arguing endlessly over questions of maximum speed, talon length, beak strength. She’d never paid much attention. After all, if you were on a bird, and you were fighting someone who wasn’t, the brute fucking fact of the bird itself was the deciding factor, not a few extra inches of talon. It had always seemed to her like quibbling over the raw tonnage of available warships when you were planning to go up against a nation whose best notion of a navy involved swimming.

Except that wasn’t the case here. If she managed to find a way onto the island, if she managed to get the washouts mounted up, it would be birds against birds. The little differences suddenly mattered.

Jak just watched the kettral, panning back and forth with the long lens, sometimes taking it away from his eye to watch the whole group gliding toward them in loose formation. Then, as though responding to some unheard note on the breeze, he turned abruptly south, body stiffening as he stared through the wooden tube. Gwenna tried to follow his gaze, but she couldn’t see much without a long lens of her own.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Holy Hull,” Jak breathed, ignoring her.

“Jak,” she snapped, reaching for the bow at her side.

“He’s alive,” the flier said. He lowered the long lens finally and met her glare. There were tears in his eyes. “Allar’ra.”

Gwenna glanced back south. This time she could see a flash of gold in the high noon light.

“Another bird?” she said, shaking her head.

Jak nodded slowly. “My bird. The one I trained.”

He passed her the long lens, but she waved it away. The creature was at least a mile behind the others, but closing at a furious pace. Already, she could see it was gaining.

“Never heard of a bird with golden plumage.”

“Command didn’t like it,” Jak replied. “Said he was cursed by Hull. Too easy to see, especially at night. None of the other cadets wanted to train him, so I did. I called him the Dawn King.”

Great, Gwenna thought, blowing out a long breath. The Dawn King. The bird almost as broken as the washout who trained him.

As Allar’ra drew closer, however, he looked anything but broken. He was larger than the others, for one thing, substantially larger, and though Gwenna was no expert on avian flight, there was something about his wingbeat, something horribly strong and smooth. It had taken him only a matter of minutes to catch up with the others, and she stared as they passed directly overhead, shivering momentarily as the dark shadows scudded over the ground, silent, and so fast. It was like some part of her remembered being a squirrel once, a mouse, remembered cowering in dense clover, willing the heart to stillness, refusing to look up as death passed on silent wings.

As the kettral drew closer to the cliffs of the rocky island, the golden bird suddenly beat his wings, just half a dozen powerful strokes, and he was a hundred feet and more above the rest.

“We want him,” Jak said simply.

“What about the eye-catching plumage?” Gwenna murmured.

“Everyone’s got flaws.”

“Sure, but I’m not looking to add more to the group.”

“We want him,” Jak said again. “You have to trust me on this. I trained him.”

Trained. It was not a word Gwenna would have used to describe the creature, not any more than she would when speaking of a crag cat or rabid brindled bear. Even silent, even gliding, the Dawn King looked wild, predatory, utterly unbridlable. Then he spread his wings, cracked his beak, and split the sky with a shriek that seemed one part challenge, one part rage. The two smaller birds behind and below, the siblings Sente’ril and Sente’ra, split apart, screaming their answer to the challenge.

“This is their sport,” Jak said, his voice soft with reverence.

It looked, at first, like a horribly lopsided contest. Sente’ril and Sente’ra set on the King from both sides at once, claws stretched out before them, raking, grasping. The larger bird, despite his altitude, looked cornered, caught as the siblings swept together. He couldn’t face both at once, and if he turned to meet one, the other would have him. Gwenna had watched birds with fliers spar in the air, each trying to get behind and above the other, into a position where the Kettral stationed on the talons could loose their arrows at will.

That was nothing like this.

At the last moment, just as ’Ril and ’Ra closed on him, the King folded his vast wings and … rolled.

“What…,” Gwenna breathed.

“Most birds won’t fight from that altitude,” Jak replied, unable to keep the pride from his voice. “He will.”

Suddenly upside down and just below his attackers, the huge bird could bring his own talons to bear. He locked claws with one of the siblings, then twisted viciously in the air, slamming one smaller bird into the other. Sente’ril and Sente’ra plummeted as the King pulled himself clear, righting himself as the water rushed up and his two assailants crashed toward the waves. They caught themselves at the last moment, swooping clear on outspread wings, no challenge this time, not even a glance back.

“He’ll leave them?” Gwenna asked quietly.

“They’re sparring,” Jak replied. “He’s not trying to kill them.”

“Like blood time,” she said. “In the arena.”

“Considerably more civil than that, actually.”

“It doesn’t look civil.”

“It does, once you know what to look for.”

The second fight was more protracted than the first. Rather than two birds ganging up on one, Suant’ra, Kei’ta, and Shura’ka all battled each other. None had the obvious advantage, at least not at first, and the avian brawl seemed to stretch on half the morning, a savage display of beaks and talons, wings frantically hammering, huge bodies locked together, falling, then breaking apart. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, the smallest of the three, Kei’ta, peeled away, climbing clear of the conflict, then coming to roost on the stone cliffs. Not long after, Shura’ka seized ’Ra by the wing, claws clutching hard enough to hold, but not hard enough to break or tear. ’Ra twisted, let out an agonized shriek. Shura’ka let her go.

“I’ve never seen that,” Gwenna said.

Jak shrugged. “Most Kettral don’t. The fliers are interested, of course, but for the rest … it’s a long swim over here, and for what? It’s not like the bird’s going to be doing any of this with a Wing strapped into the talons.” He frowned. “Like expecting a horse to gallop with a grown man tied to each leg.”

“So we want the King,” Gwenna said. “And Shura’ka, clearly. Who’s the third?”

Jak hesitated, then shook his head. “Not Shura’ka.”

“She handled ’Ra and that other one easily enough.”

“She’s limited,” Jak replied. “Slow rotation to the right, a stupid tendency never to check out and below her left wing. A dozen other things.…”

“And does any of it matter? I thought we were choosing the best birds, the ones that can win when things get bloody.”

“The bird that wins fighting alone isn’t the same as the bird that wins carrying a Wing,” Jak replied carefully. “We want the King, Kei’ta, and your old bird.”

“She’s injured,” Gwenna protested. “Even I can see it.”

“And she’s smart. She’s wily.”

“She lost.”

“She lost today,” Jak replied quietly. “Tomorrow is another chance.”