The Last Mortal Bond

31

The barrel was cramped, and dark, and hot. It reeked of rum. The rum wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t also smelled like pickled herring, and curdled goat’s milk, and the rancid oil that Gwenna had dumped into the harbor shortly before climbing into the fucking thing. The residents of Hook reused their barrels. Gwenna herself was only the most recent cargo, and whatever happened in the following days, she was unlikely to be its last. She imagined herself shattered on the rocks at the bottom of Skarn’s limestone cliffs, or floating facedown in the waves. People were expendable, especially on the Islands, but a good barrel … you didn’t just let a good barrel go to waste. She tried to imagine what it might hold next.

The question was, in its own odd way, relaxing. Better to think about those wooden staves brimming with whale oil or bootlegged ale than to spend too much time dwelling on the fact that she had willingly let herself be nailed into a cylindrical wooden coffin. She’d done hundreds of barrel drops in training, but never from inside of the ’Kent-kissing barrel.

Of course, the plan wasn’t to get dropped fifty feet into the waves. The plan was to be set down as slowly and gently as an actual barrel of rum, to sit silently until nightfall, and then to carve her way free of the cramped space with the chisel, hand brace, and belt knife she had secreted beneath her crunched-up knees. She would have preferred to bring more weapons-her smoke steel blades, at the very least-but there wasn’t room in the barrel for more, not if she didn’t want to risk cutting off her leg in transit.

In theory, it wouldn’t matter. She was going to Skarn to steal birds, not to fight Rallen and his men. In theory, she would connect with Quick Jak and Talal, both of whom were tucked inside barrels of their own, slip out of the storeroom, find the birds they wanted, and get in the air. In theory, Rallen wouldn’t even know they’d come and gone until they were back again, the bird loaded with a full Wing this time, to gut the treacherous ex-Kettral leach and his bloody band.

That was the theory, anyway.

It had sounded good back in the Hole. She’d gone over it with Annick and Talal at least a dozen times. Now that she was nailed into the reeking barrel, the whole thing seemed a lot more likely to end in a quick, vicious death. There were dozens of ways the plan could go awry. The birds tasked with hauling the supplies-“tribute and taxation” as Rallen called the stacked crates and barrels-might drop her into the surf. Rallen’s soldiers might decide to inspect the goods before flying them over to the island stronghold. Some of the rabble from Hook, furious at the burning of their homes, might decide to set the barrels ablaze out of sheer rebellious spite. It wouldn’t matter much, once she started cooking, that they were all supposed to be on the same side.

And then there was the question of what would happen over on Skarn, provided they landed safely and were able to break free. It had been more than a week since the makeshift Trial, enough time for all but the worst of the wounds to knit closed, for bruises to fade, for the consumed albumen of the slarn eggs to begin its slow, subtle change in the flesh of the newest Kettral. Whether they were aware of their keener senses, of the fresh strength threaded through their muscles, Gwenna couldn’t say.

She could see the difference, though. They had come out of the Hole harder, more willing to stand straight and keep their eyes up. It was more than Gwenna had dared hope for, actually, a reward commensurate with the risk, and yet she found herself dwelling, not on the triumphs of the living, but on the silence of the dead, on the three who hadn’t come out of the caves. They had paid the price for her gamble. The three of them, and, in a different way, Quick Jak.

After their tense exchange on the day of the Trial itself, Gwenna had avoided another confrontation with the flier. She was worried she might hit him. Hurt him. Try as she might, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe his story, not all of it. It seemed too easy, too pat, that he should come out of the darkness alone, nearly unharmed, when the others were cut to shreds. There wasn’t anything to be gained, though, from badgering him. You couldn’t shake the truth out of a man. Cut it out, maybe. Burn it out. But then you might as well be Jakob Rallen. Then you might as well be the ’Kent-kissing Urghul.

The simplest solution to the problem of the flier’s cowardice would have been to ground him, to keep him in the caves until the fight was finished, then dump him off over on Arim, let him live out his days somewhere he couldn’t get anyone killed. As Annick kept pointing out, some people just weren’t meant to be Kettral. The trouble was, Gwenna didn’t quite believe that. Or she believed the general principle, but couldn’t convince herself that it was true of Jak. Every time she was ready to give up on him, she remembered just how easily he’d made the grueling swim to Skarn, how thoughtful he was when he wasn’t terrified, how rational. And then there were Laith’s words rattling around in the back of her head. Laith had said Quick Jak was the best flier on the Islands, and the truth was, she needed a flier.

Others could learn, of course, once they’d taken back control, but in order to do that, in order to kill Rallen and his batch of thugs, Gwenna needed fliers now, needed someone she could nail in a barrel, who could take control of a bird as soon as they broke out over on Skarn.

She’d almost chosen Delka. The woman was older than Jak, weaker and slower, but she was steady, reliable. When Gwenna went to talk to her, however, Delka had convinced her otherwise.

“You’re in command,” she’d said, shaking her head, “and if you tell me to go, I’ll go. But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“The mistake has a name,” Gwenna’d spat. “Quick Jak. He’ll start shitting himself the minute someone draws a sword.”

“But no one’s supposed to draw swords. That’s the plan, right? Sneak in, get the birds, sneak out. Jak freezes when he has to fight, but there shouldn’t be any fighting.”

Gwenna ground her teeth. “Shouldn’t isn’t the same as won’t. I can’t be certain what’s going to happen once we get over there.”

“Of course you can’t,” Delka said. “You play the odds. I was already over on Arim when Jak started his training. We heard the stories, even over there. A flier like him comes along once in a generation, if you’re lucky, and if Rallen comes after you while you’re in the air, you’re going to need the best flier you can get.”

Gwenna glanced the length of the cave. Quick Jak was in the shadow of a large stalactite, working through his sword forms over and over. The moves were good, fluid, but it was easy to be fluid when someone wasn’t hitting you back. “Fuck,” she said.

To her surprise, Delka smiled. “Fuck, indeed.”

“You think he can do it?”

The older woman shrugged. “I don’t know. But there’s one other thing, right? That bird, the huge one?”

Gwenna nodded slowly. “Allar’ra.”

“It’s Jak’s. He trained it.”

And that settled the question, to the extent that it could be settled. Gwenna spent the next nine days swinging between irritation and impatience, trying to beat a little last-minute training into the heads of the men and women newly under her command, trying to hammer out a plan that wouldn’t get them all killed, and all the while worrying that right now, when they were so close to go-time, Rallen would discover their hideaway, blow shut the entrance in the stone above, and leave them all to rot. It was almost a relief to climb finally into the barrel. At least the time had come to do something, even if doing meant sitting in the hot, cramped dark, trying not to vomit from the smell.

When the bird finally arrived, that relief had faded to a dull ache pervading muscle and bone. There was no real way to mark time inside the barrel. For a while she tried counting heartbeats, but they were too loud, too jarring, and after a hundred or so, she tried focusing on something else-the waves washing the rocks, the indignant screeching of the gulls, anything to take her mind off the staves squeezing her from every side.

Even focused on the world outside her tiny wooden prison, she almost missed the bird’s approach. Kettral tended to screech when they stooped-a habit encouraged by most fliers-but there was no need for such a precipitous dive to pick up a load of cargo. The bird came in low and quiet from the east. Gwenna caught the whrrr of wind feathering the great wings, then felt the barrel’s sickening lurch as the kettral caught the cargo net in its claws, lifting the whole load into the air.

It took a few moments to get used to the motion, to the creak of the heavy ropes, and the groaning protestations of the cargo. The load was too large for one bird, and there was no way of knowing whether Gwenna had been bundled into the same grab net with Talal or Quick Jak. Not that it ought to matter. The whole stack of goods was bound for Skarn. They could rendezvous when they arrived.

The flight was short, a lot shorter than the swim, and there was no more warning for the drop than there had been for the pickup-just half a heartbeat of sick, sudden weightlessness followed by a tooth-rattling thud.

Gwenna twisted inside the barrel, trying to ease the pain in her cramped legs. Hours of motionlessness had wrapped a thick strap of tension across the muscles of her back. It would be a bitch drilling her way out, and she could already feel the lead-heavy ache that would make an awkward mess out of her first few steps. Those were problems she’d anticipated, however, problems she could solve. The first hurdle was behind her.

She wondered how the others were faring. Talal was slightly taller than Gwenna, but Jak would have the hardest time of it. He’d gone in first, knees, then elbows, then shoulders scraping against the barrel’s rim. Gwenna had watched him, trying to decide if he’d make it through half a day trapped inside the thing, trying to read his face for any hint of panic, any sign that he’d lose it once they hammered the lid shut. The flier grimaced silently as the rough wood tore open the slarn scab on his upper arm, then, as though feeling Gwenna’s gaze upon him, glanced over. He didn’t do anything when she met his eyes. Didn’t scowl, or nod. Didn’t even blink. If he looked ready to be locked inside the barrel, it was only because he looked half dead.

But he’s here, Gwenna reminded herself. He’d managed to remain silent during the long wait and the short flight. The rest of it, the stealing of the birds, the flying … that was the shit he was supposed to be good at. That was why she’d risked bringing him in the first place.

She shifted, trying to get a better grip on the hand brace, then froze at the sound of voices approaching. Three of them. All male. No, she realized, listening more intently. Four. The fourth wasn’t talking, but she could hear his footfalls alongside the others’: soles scuffing over rough stone. The men paused just a few paces away. She imagined them standing at the edge of the piled barrels and crates. Slowly, silently, she pressed her hands against the wooden staves, bracing herself for the jostling to come.

“Which ones you want to start with?” A deep voice, and loud. The man sounded amused for some reason.

“Up to you, Ren. We gotta move ’em all in the end.”

“Not necessarily,” said a third voice, high-pitched and sly. “We could just … lose a couple. Right over the edge of the cliff.”

A pause, then laughter all around.

Gwenna tensed. They were joking, clearly. There was no point in hauling supplies all the way from Hook only to chuck them off the limestone cliffs. Even Rallen’s thugs couldn’t be that lazy.

“That’s our food, you fuckin’ fool. Whatta’ya want to get rid of it for?”

“Not all our food, is it? Rallen’s going to eat half a’ what’s here. I’m not sayin’ we chuck anything good, but surely we can do without half a ton a’ … say … squash.”

Squash. That was Jak’s barrel. The rebels had filled two burlap sacks with the yellow and green vegetables in order to make enough room for the flier. She tensed, a slow, cold dread creeping up her spine. Suddenly, horribly, she felt the full weight of her helplessness. Training didn’t matter if you couldn’t move, and combat nerves weren’t worth much if you couldn’t get to the actual combat. Worse, she wasn’t the only one listening to the lazy banter. Quick Jak would be able to hear the men as well as Gwenna herself. He’d know better than she did that six letters-S Q U A S H-were stamped in bold red ink on the lid of his barrel.

Stay cool, Jak, she prayed quietly. They’re just joking. Just fucking around. Stay cool.

“I like squash,” one of the men was saying. “You’re not tossing my barrel of squash.”

“We’re not tossing anything,” the first voice cut in. “We’re going to do what we’re told to do. Let’s go. One man to a barrel. Get ’em rolling.”

Something was wrong. A voice was screaming inside her skull to abort, abort, abort. Only there was no aborting. There was no doing anything. As the barrel lurched onto its side, she tightened her grip on the chisel. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would kill a man quick enough if you put it in his eye.

The ’Shael-spawned thing almost ended up in her own eye when the barrel lurched into motion. Whoever was pushing it wasn’t making any effort to save the wooden staves, and the whole thing bounced over the rough ground, jolting against the rocks, jostling into larger obstacles, all with Gwenna spinning inside it, trying not to vomit into her own mouth. They couldn’t have covered more than a hundred paces, but by the time it was done, she felt bruised in a dozen places, battered at the knees, back, and elbows.

While Gwenna tried to sort up from down, a door creaked open, salt-rusted hinges shrieking. She just had time to locate the ocean behind her, waves breaking against the stone, and then she was moving again. There was no light inside the barrel, but the shift from uneven stone onto smooth wood planking told her all she needed to know-they’d entered the warehouse.

Suspicion and unease still coiled around her chest like a huge snake, constricting each time she drew a breath. She kept the chisel clutched in her hand, but clutching it was about all she could do as she listened to the other barrels jolting over the stone, the cursing of the men as they hauled in other crates and containers. Then there was only silence, thick and hot. Then a voice, Jakob Rallen’s, that sullen anger of his as instantly recognizable as the sound of the waves.

“Which one is the leach?”

“Not here, Commander. Must be in the next load.”

He knows, Gwenna realized with horror. He knows the whole fucking thing.

“You’re sure?” Rallen demanded. “He didn’t slip away?”

“I don’t think so, sir. The bastard’s nailed inside a barrel. Hard to slip away from that.”

Rallen just grunted his agreement, then, with an imperious gesture Gwenna couldn’t see but could picture perfectly, pointed at her barrel.

“Get her out.”

The blows started before she could come up with anything resembling a plan, before she could even protest. Someone was hitting the barrel with a heavy hammer, two or three people really, the brutal blows landing over and over, splintering the wooden staves, driving the shards of oak into her skin. The heavy steel hammers came down again and again, bruising her hips and shoulders. One particularly vicious strike sent a spike of pain shooting down her leg. There was nothing to do. No way to fight. Even as the hammers smashed holes in the barrel, the metal hoops held, trapping her inside. She wondered if Rallen intended to see her beaten to a meaty pulp right there on the wooden floor, struggled to cover her head with her arms, then realized that for all their ferocity, the men wielding the hammers were avoiding her head. They weren’t trying to kill her. At least not yet. Not quickly.

With some difficulty, she brought her arms down, tucking her hands into the safe space in the hollow of her knees, protecting them. If there was ever a weapon close to hand she wanted to be able to grab the fucking thing. It was tempting to close her eyes, but closed eyelids weren’t going to stop an eight-pound hammerhead, and she forced herself to keep them open, trying, through the haze of pink pain and the barrel’s wreckage, to piece together the layout of the cavernous room.

The space was large, but dim and windowless. When her head stopped spinning long enough, she caught a glimpse of wooden boxes stacked all the way to the eaves. So they had brought her to the warehouse. She stifled a grim laugh. At least that part of the plan had worked out. Of Talal, there was no sign. A few paces away, however, stood the tall barrel stamped Squash.

Not only did Rallen know we were coming, she thought as the hammers rose and fell, he knew which ’Kent-kissing barrels to go after.

Finally, after what seemed like an age, the staves around her collapsed. She could hear Rallen’s panting, hear the hammering hearts of his soldiers, and below that, another sound, a low, angry groaning. It was her own voice, she realized, and she went to work stopping it.

Three steel hoops still ringed her folded body. She tried to straighten her legs, failed, strangled a scream before it clawed its way out of her throat, then tried again.

Between the long, motionless hours and the beating, she wondered if it was still possible to straighten her legs. She’d seen ex-Kettral before, men and women who took a bad fall during barrel drops or on a botched extract, who couldn’t move from the waist down. Terror at the prospect took her by the neck, tried to shake her, but she forced it away, focused on her legs once more. At last, agonizingly, she managed to get them to twitch. They burned, throbbed, but she kept going, trying to loosen tendons twisted to the breaking point.

These assholes better watch out, she thought, twisting her neck, hoping that the exploding pain there didn’t mean anything important. At this rate I’ll be able to attack some time around the middle of next month.

Rallen, however, was taking no chances. “Get back!” he snapped at his men. “Back! All of you. She is not some useless washout, she is Kettral. Real Kettral.”

Gwenna might have taken more satisfaction from the warning if she’d been able to stand up. She rolled onto her side, managed to get her bloody knees beneath her, then to lever herself up onto her elbows, raising her head enough to look around. Rallen had left nothing to chance.

Two soldiers in blacks-one man, one woman-covered her with flatbows from five paces away. Too far to lunge at before they got off a shot; too close to even hope that they might miss. And they weren’t the only ones. Two other men had put down their hammers and drawn their double blades. They’d been enthusiastic enough in breaking her out, but now that she was free, they watched her as they would a viper, eyes fixed on that chisel in her hand. She debated throwing it. She could kill one of them, at least, but there wasn’t much point in killing just one.

“Five on one?” she said to the men with the swords, packing her voice with as much scorn as it would bear. “You didn’t want to bring a few more, just to be on the safe side?” She locked eyes with the nearer of the two soldiers, smiled, then snapped her teeth at him. He jerked back as though stung, then, realizing his folly, started forward, anger bright in his eyes.

“Stand back, you idiot!” Rallen snapped. “She is baiting you. Trying to force a mistake.”

Not that it would matter much. Rallen’s men could make a dozen mistakes, and they’d still have the odds. Still, it was nice to know she’d put them on edge. Despite the birds, the blacks, and the blades, these soldiers weren’t true Kettral, and they knew it.

Gwenna turned from the men with the swords and bows, neck shrieking with pain, to face Jakob Rallen himself. A year earlier, the Master of Cadets had been the fattest man on Qarsh. He’d broken his leg during a botched drop shortly after his own Trial, and the bone had set wrong, making it impossible for him to run or swim. He’d barely been able to walk without his cane, in fact, and in all Gwenna’s years as a cadet, she’d rarely seen him outside his office. He ate at his desk, shoving aside his papers to make space for a piled plate carried in by whatever young soldier had been unlucky enough to earn that particular punishment, and he went outside only for the short trek between Eyrie command and the small cottage afforded him as a top-ranking officer.

Despite the extra weight, however, it had been possible back then to see that Rallen had been a soldier once. There had still been slabs of muscle under the fat, thick arms and legs that would have been punishing in the arena. And his keen dark eyes had missed absolutely nothing.

All of that had changed. The fat was gone, gone so fully it might have evaporated, leaving his gray-brown skin hanging loose over his bones. It was hardly a healthy transformation. He sat on a single crate that someone had hauled out into the center of the room as though it were a makeshift throne, but he displayed none of the effortless ease one expected of men on thrones. The cloth of his blacks was soaked. Sweat glistened on his bald head, despite the shade of the warehouse. And his eyes-they were bright but glazed as he stared at her.

Still dangerous, she thought as she studied him. Maybe more dangerous, but not as sharp.

She couldn’t help shaking her head. “You’re all taking your orders from this piece of shit?”

Rallen just smiled, a thin, mirthless expression, raised a clay cup to his lips, drank deep, then widened his smile. “Gwenna Sharpe. You always had too high an opinion of yourself, too little respect for anyone else. Here you are hurling insults, but it is you whose training appears to have been worthless. You who have stupidly delivered yourself to me like a side of pork.”

That got a chuckle from a couple of the soldiers. Gwenna could feel her cheeks flushing, the anger burning through her bones. Her muscles tensed for the lunge. She could kill him. If he weren’t a leach. Even with a couple arrows in her side she could live long enough to choke the life out of the bastard. Jaw clenched, she throttled the urge. He was a leach. For all she knew, he could burn her to ash if she blinked the wrong way.

“How did you know?” she demanded. “About the barrels?”

The man took another long sip from his cup. His pupils widened as he watched her, as though drinking in the sight. “You have a lot to learn, Sharpe, about leadership. About loyalty.”

The words carved a sick pit in her gut.

“Who talked?”

Rallen pursed his lips. “You don’t want to guess?”

Half a dozen names came to her at once, rose halfway up her throat before she swallowed them. It might be a game to Rallen, but that didn’t mean she had to play.

“Not really,” she replied, sucking the blood from her split lip, then spitting it out in a slick bolus on the wooden floor.

Even that minimal defiance made the nearest soldiers twitch. Gwenna looked over at the two with the flatbows, focusing, after a moment, on the woman. She was noticeably older than most of Rallen’s other recruits, maybe around thirty, though her arms were firm and her shoulders wider than those of most men.

“You’re holding it wrong,” Gwenna said, nodding to the flatbow.

The woman’s lips twisted. She took a hesitant step back, gaze darting between Gwenna and the weapon.

“Don’t listen to her, Pol,” Rallen growled. “She’s testing you. That’s all. Just trying to find a weakness.”

The woman named Pol colored, half lifted the flatbow to her shoulder, and stepped forward again menacingly.

“You want to play with me?” she demanded, fear transmuted to fury in that strange, sudden way Gwenna had seen so often in the arena. “You still gonna want to play with me when you’ve got a flatbow bolt shoved halfway down your throat?”

Gwenna shrugged. “Probably. Why don’t you try it and we’ll find out.”

“Enough,” Rallen snapped, half rising to his feet. “Pol! Stand back.” The woman hesitated, then cursed under her breath and retreated several steps. Rallen turned his attention to Gwenna once again. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to drive a wedge between me and my people. It’s sad, actually, because you’re too stupid to realize that is precisely what I’ve already done to you.” He spread his hands. “Hobb? Remember him? He gave you to me. For free. A gesture of goodwill, he said.”

Rage burned in Gwenna’s throat, hot and bilious, so thick she thought she might choke on it. Rallen, however, was watching her above the rim of his cup, and so she forced her face to remain still, indifferent.

“Thanks for sharing. I’ll be sure to kill him first. After you, I mean.”

The man coughed up a disgusted laugh. “Don’t bother taunting me. It won’t work. As for why these loyal men and women follow me…” He half raised a languid hand, twisting his fingers as he did.

Gwenna felt a great invisible fist close around her, the empty air suddenly harder than the barrel staves had been. Harder and far, far tighter. She could barely breathe inside Rallen’s invisible grip, couldn’t even kick when he lifted her clear off the floor, held her twitching in midair.

“They follow me for the same reason that men have always followed other men: power.”

He rotated a lazy finger and Gwenna found herself revolving slowly in midair. The awed, frightened faces of Rallen’s soldiers told the whole story. So, Gwenna thought grimly, I guess he can reach his well from here. When she was finally facing Rallen again, he smiled. She stopped spinning, a puppet yanked short by a string.

“Wait there,” Rallen said, sipping from his cup as he turned his attention to the other barrel. “While we get this other idiot out.”

This time, his words were slightly slurred. Gwenna eyed the cup, wondering if the man were drunk barely halfway through the day. Then the hammering started again, the crack of steel against stave followed by the sickening thud as the blows connected with human flesh. Gwenna couldn’t turn her head to look behind her, but she could smell the fear on Jak-acrid as burning tar-and she could see Rallen’s eyes, glazed but greedy as he watched the unfolding violence. There was blood on the air now, mixed with Jak’s terror.

When the blows finally stopped, Rallen smiled.

“Tie him,” he said, gesturing toward the flier. As the soldiers set to work, Rallen reached out to refill his clay cup from a cast-iron kettle set on a crate beside him. “I’m enjoying this.”

The acrid steam made Gwenna want to sneeze. It took her a moment to ransack her memory, but when she finally recognized the smell, she understood a dozen things at once: the fields of sun-bright flowers spread across the land around Hook; the slurring of Rallen’s words; the weight loss; the slack, grayish skin hanging off of him in folds; that unfocused, abstracted look in his eyes. In a snap, it all made sense.

“Yellowbloom,” Gwenna said. Her voice sounded all busted up. Rallen’s invisible bands wrapped so tightly she had to force the words out. It hardly seemed worth the effort, but she’d be shipped to ’Shael if she’d wait patiently for the bastard to have his way. The taunting took all her breath, but it was worth it. “Drinking up your own profits?”

Rallen’s gaze sharpened for a moment, as though she’d actually managed to land a blow. Then he relaxed, laughed, raised his cup in a mock salute, and drank deep once more.

“The flower is much maligned,” he said, swirling the cup and considering the steaming liquid within. “Properly cultivated, it is fine as the best wines. And yet,” he said, setting the vessel down, “I don’t want to dull my enjoyment of the coming entertainment.”

The former Master of Cadets was obviously pretty dulled already. Yellowbloom was weaker than whiskey, but the effects were less predictable. Some people reported visions, others nothing more than a vast lassitude settling over them, like a silk sheet spread over the mind. Gwenna had tried it once in some shithole over on Hook, just a small cup. It made her skin burn. Then it made her want to fight.

That Rallen was drinking it now, in the middle of a crucial operation, was massively, inexcusably stupid. Clearly, he had moved on from enjoyment of the plant to need. This was the sort of error that could get people killed.

So figure out a way to kill him, you useless bitch.

She tested her bonds silently, straining against emptiness that might have been iron. Behind her, Jak groaned once, then fell silent. They’d drag Talal in soon enough, then smash apart his barrel, too. Gwenna could still talk. If she was fast enough, she could warn the leach before they started in with the hammers. Not much of a fucking warning. Talal’s well wasn’t that strong, and there wasn’t that much steel in the room. She’d never seen him manage anything like the kenning that held her motionless in the air.

His well, she thought, turning her attention back to Rallen. If she could figure out his well, find a way to-

The truth hit her like a shovel-butt to the stomach. She stared, first at the leach, then at the cup at his side. The yellowbloom. Rallen wasn’t keeping ahold of his twisted power in spite of the drink; the drink was the source of his power. Holy Hull, she realized, the yellowbloom is his well.

All those fields on Hook, the long rows of sun-bright flowers-Rallen wasn’t growing them to sell, at least not entirely. He was tending to his own supply. He could never have used the drug so aggressively when the Eyrie still existed. He would have been found out in a matter of weeks, and ousted from his post. Since the fall of the Kettral, however, everything had changed. He could glut himself on the leaf. He had to, in fact, if he wanted to keep the soldiers under his own command awed, cowed. A fat man with a busted knee was weak, vulnerable, even to the sort of half-trained washouts that Rallen had assembled around him. The only way to hold them under his heel was to show-as he was doing now, just by holding Gwenna motionless in the air-that he could reach his well at any time, that with a flick of the finger he could destroy anyone opposing him.

It left the man walking a delicate line. The ravages of the yellowbloom were already clear, after no more than a year. He needed the leaf, needed his well, but a drug was still a drug. It would be dulling his mind, making him slow, even as the power poured through his veins. On the other hand, he seemed to have found a workable balance. No one on the Islands had managed to topple him.

But then, Gwenna thought, eyeing the leach, maybe they just didn’t shove hard enough.

If she was right, if Rallen relied on the yellowbloom in difficult situations, he would be hitting it extra hard today. He would want to make an example, not just of Gwenna and the rest, but of his own power. It was working. Two of his soldiers were guarding Jak, but the others had lowered their bows and blades, were watching Gwenna with smug satisfaction. They had ceded their own vigilance to the leach. It was an opportunity, if only a slim one.…

“So,” Gwenna asked, raising her brows, trying to keep her voice casual despite the iron bands around her chest. “How do you want to die?”

Rallen’s lips tightened for a moment. He reached for the cup at his side. Gwenna forced her face into a smirk. Go ahead, she thought. Reach for it. Keep drinking.

The leach took a small sip. It seemed to settle him. He watched Gwenna a while, then shook his head.

“Your sad little gibes are tedious.”

“Then kill me, you impotent fuck.”

As gambits went, it seemed safe enough. Rallen could have tossed her barrel off a cliff the moment she landed. The fact that she was alive meant that he wanted her alive, at least for a while longer.

“I will be delighted,” he said, “when the time comes. For now, there are still a few things we need to discuss.”

“I’m not much for discussion.”

The Kettral commander exhaled heavily. “You know how this goes as well as I do, Sharpe. I was the one who trained you. Do we really need to walk through all the steps?”

“Trained me?” Gwenna raised an eyebrow. “You sat behind a desk and gave orders. You were weak then, and you are weak now. The women and men who trained me could break you across a knee.”

“And where are they now?” Rallen demanded. “They are dead. Surely you remember your Hendran: All that matters, when the fight’s over, is who is still alive.” He looked around as though appreciating his own survival for the first time. “Looks like I win.”

The words were confident, undeniable, but he raised the cup to his lips again.

“Oh, the fight’s not over,” Gwenna replied airily, trying to shape her face into something that might read as amused indifference.

Rallen frowned, drank. “Actually, I would say it is. Here you are, bound like a bitch for the Manjari flesh markets. In fact, the idea of selling you when this is done entertains me. Of course, you’ll be horribly mutilated. It’s a shame, in a way-”

“Save your pity for yourself,” Gwenna said, cutting him off, meeting his stare with her own. Let him think she had a plan. Let him think he needed even more strength to meet it.

Rallen narrowed his eyes, chewed at the inside of his cheek as he studied her warily. “You think you’re clever.” He raised his cup to his lips, found it empty, frowned, then reached over to refill it from the kettle. When Gwenna had tried yellowbloom, a cup smaller than her closed fist had made her feel crazy. Rallen, on the other hand, had likely been drinking it every day for a year. There was no telling how much he could handle. It was altogether possible that her goading was only making him more powerful, that it wasn’t compromising his judgment or timing at all. Not that she had any other ideas.

“Luckily, I don’t need to be clever,” Gwenna said. “Not when you’re the target.”

The final word had the intended effect. Rallen’s soldiers shifted uncomfortably, glances sliding from the leach to Gwenna and back. Whatever show Rallen had hoped to put on, Gwenna clearly wasn’t playing her part.

“Let me explain this to you in a way that might penetrate,” Rallen said, more loudly now. Was she just imagining that the slurring had grown worse? “I am going to hurt you. Then I am going to hurt you worse.…”

“Then hurt me,” Gwenna said. “Start hurting. What’s with all the talk?”

Rallen’s lips pulled back in a snarl. He tightened his fist, and Gwenna felt her ribs bend painfully. He stabbed a finger at her. “I’m looking forward to driving a knife between your tits, but first you’re going to satisfy my curiosity on a number of points. If you were the type to take advice, I’d make a suggestion: answer my questions directly, and I’ll kill you quickly. But then, you’ve always been dumb and stubborn, so it seems we’re going to have to go back to the Uses and Methods.”

Rallen smiled, as though he could see the fear he’d kindled inside her burning like a hot, silent ember.

The real title of the volume was On the Uses, Methods, and Limitations of Torture. When Gwenna was first introduced to it as a third-year cadet, she’d thought it the most horrifying book she’d ever seen. Page after page of hand-inked illustrations comprised a catalogue of agony: men flayed or burned, bruised or broken, cut open so slowly and carefully that they remained alive even as the torturer removed the various organs.… She’d known this was coming, but still felt her guts go watery at the mention of the title.

“In fact,” she made herself say, shoving aside the fear, filing her voice flat, “you’re wrong. You’re already dead.” She forced herself to smile. “You just don’t know it yet.”

It was an insane claim, beyond madness. Rallen stared at her blearily, glanced up into the rafters, then toward the doors, as though expecting the warehouse to implode at any point. Then he raised the cup to his lips again.