The Last Mortal Bond

39

Justice, as it turned out, was a lot harder than war.

War was largely a series of technical questions, a matter of taking living human bodies and making them dead. There were infinite variations in the tactics and the strategy, of course, nuances in weaponry and technique, but the basic premise was bedrock: you’d done it right if you were alive at the end of the day, and the other poor fool was not. Jakob Rallen, for instance-Gwenna had put a knife through his neck the day before almost without thinking, hurling the blade even as Annick and the rest of the Kettral swept low over the compound. It was almost easy, when it came down to it. Trivial.

Gwenna had never really enjoyed killing. She still had nightmares about the Annurians she’d cut down in the brutal Urghul pits, awful dreams from which she woke soaked in a sweat that felt, in the midnight hours, like hot blood. Even what came later, the men and women she’d killed in proper battle, were hard to stomach when she pondered them from the still, cool darkness between waking and dawn’s first light. She could see the pale blue eyes of a horseman she’d stabbed in Andt-Kyl, the way they went suddenly wide as her blade slid past his ribs, then flat, lifeless as broken crockery. In her dreams she tried to talk to him, to scream at him, to urge him to go the fuck home.

The thing about those fights, though, was just that: they had been fights. Even at the bloodiest, especially at the bloodiest, a combination of rage, and righteousness, and training had carried Gwenna through, her own thudding pulse holding her up even when her mind quailed at the madness of it. What she faced now was something different.

A score of men and women knelt before her in the soft earth beneath the tenebral oak: Rallen’s soldiers-the ones that were left-and there at the end, Manthe and Hobb, the traitors. Most kept their faces down, avoiding Gwenna’s gaze, avoiding the eyes of the Kettral who stood behind her. Looking at them bound and bruised, it was tough to believe that so few soldiers had tyrannized the Islands so effectively, so brutally, for so long.

The kid at the end had been in Gwenna’s own class of cadets-a pale-skinned young woman named Urri. She’d been training to be a sniper, but wasn’t very good, and had washed out a year before the Trial. Beside her knelt a middle-aged man. He was weeping silently, tears carving through the grime on his face. Every so often he’d raise his red-rimmed eyes slowly, tentatively, as though hoping Gwenna might have disappeared; every time he found her standing there, fists on her hips, he’d cringe, fold a little further into himself, as though his own dread had cored him out. It went like that straight on down the line.

Gwenna stared at them a moment longer, then, disgusted, raised her eyes to the branches of the ancient tree. Instead of leaves, ten thousand bats hung from the tenebral’s twisting limbs. They would wake at dusk in a great rustle of wings, take to the air, harry the creatures of the night, both the large and small, sinking fangs into bird or beast, any creature with hot, beating blood, drinking deep before returning at dawn to roost. The ground beneath Gwenna’s feet was soft with the blood that dripped from the bats’ fangs. It squelched beneath her boots. The massive oak had no need of sunlight; it drank the spilled blood in through the roots.

The old bastard’s going to drink deep today, Gwenna thought grimly, returning her eyes to the captives bound before her.

Justice. It sounded like such a noble word. Clean. Polished. It seemed strange that justice should come to this-a brutal bloodletting in the shadow of a blood-hungry tree. It would have been easier, in a way, to cut the throats and have done with it, but that was not justice. Justice allowed the accused to speak, to explain, to plead. That was what made it so ’Kent-kissing hard.

“You,” Gwenna said, gritting her teeth as she pointed at Urri. “Did you serve with Jakob Rallen?”

The woman’s eyelid twitched. Her mouth dropped open, revealing crooked teeth. Language seemed to have abandoned her.

“Of course she did,” Qora snarled, stepping forward beside Gwenna. “They all did-you know it as well as I do. You were there when we hauled them out of Rallen’s fucking fort. Quit this horseshit, kill them, and have done with it.”

Gwenna turned to face the other woman. Of all the newly anointed Kettral, Qora was the one who most reminded Gwenna of herself, of herself before Hull’s Trial, before she fled the Islands. A part of her wanted to agree, to slip her blades free of their sheaths, and go at the mass execution as though it were war.

“This is a trial,” she said to Qora grimly.

The blood vessels bulged beneath the skin of the woman’s shaved scalp. “Fuck your trial. These sons of bitches have been hunting us for months.” She slipped a knife from the sheath at her belt. “They’ve been killing us, murdering people over on Hook, stealing and raping. And now you want to hear them talk? Now you want to give them a chance to explain?” She shook her head. Her dark eyes were bleak, fixed on the prisoners. “No. If you won’t do it, I’m going to-”

Gwenna’s backhand blow took her across the face, knocking her to the ground. The woman snarled as she rolled into a crouch. Despite the blood pouring from her split lip, she’d managed to keep a hold on her knife.

She’ll make a good fighter someday, Gwenna noted in the back of her mind, if she can ever put a rein on that rage.

The rest of the Kettral were still, staring, unsure what to make of Qora’s challenge and Gwenna’s sudden violence. Talal raised an eyebrow, but Gwenna shook her head incrementally. She could keep knocking Qora down all day if necessary, but she didn’t want it to be necessary. She could feel her own blades, heavy in their sheaths across her back. She made no move to reach for them.

“When we’re finished,” she said, holding Qora’s gaze with her own, “you can tell me if I let them off too easy. When we’re done here, you can tell me if there was justice. If you think I’ve betrayed either you or the Eyrie, you are welcome to come after me with everything you have.” She raised her eyes to the other Kettral. “All of you are. After.

“Now, we are going to have a trial, and if you get in the way of it, I swear to you, no matter how tight your ass might happen to be, I will put my boot all the way up inside of it and keep kicking until you shut up. The Eyrie has protocol for this, and we are going to follow it.”

Qora spat blood into the moist earth beneath the tree. “The Eyrie was destroyed.”

“Well,” Gwenna replied, “now it’s back.”

* * *

I didn’t know.

When it was all finished, that was the phrase uttered more often than any other, uttered in nearly endless variations-screaming, sobbing, pleading.

I didn’t know about the murders on Hook.

I didn’t know who to trust.

I didn’t know about the builders he killed.

I didn’t know about the ships he sank.

We were Kettral.…

We were just soldiers.…

We were fighting for Annur.…

I didn’t know.…

I didn’t know.…

I didn’t know.…

Some of the men and women reeked of deceit, eyes shifting away from Gwenna every time they opened their mouths; not everyone could be ignorant of the violence that had held the Islands in thrall for nearly a year. Some of the others, though, seemed genuinely perplexed, baffled to find themselves bound beneath the bloody tree.

“Of course we killed people,” said one skinny man with a birthmark across half his face. “That’s what Kettral do. We’re soldiers.”

“It matters,” Gwenna ground out, “who you kill. And why.”

He shook his head blankly, perplexed. “We followed orders. We didn’t know-”

“If you say that one more time,” Gwenna replied quietly, “I will cut out your tongue.” She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder, toward Qora, and Quick Jak and the others. “They came from Arim, too. They were washouts, just like you. Jakob Rallen tried to give them orders, but when they realized what was happening, they refused. A lot of them died for refusing the orders you so happily followed.”

The man just stared at her. “They were traitors.”

He was still saying it, hours later, still in utter disbelief, when she finally cut his throat.

In the end, they killed all of Rallen’s soldiers. Gwenna did some of the grisly work herself, partly because it seemed necessary to acknowledge her role in the whole affair, partly to set an example for the other Kettral: “This is not about vengeance,” she said as the first body dropped. “It is about justice. You will kill quickly, cleanly, or you will join the dead.”

It didn’t take long. That fact, as much as the blood itself, made Gwenna sick. It should have taken longer, it should have been harder to turn two dozen men and women into meat. She forced the thought aside, turning her attention finally to Manthe and Hobb. She’d left them for last partly so that they could see the fate brought on them by their own betrayal, mostly because Gwenna herself wasn’t sure what to say. They’d tried, after all, to fight against Jakob Rallen, had endured the same dangers and privations as the others for so long.…

“Why?” Gwenna asked quietly.

She expected screaming from Manthe and bluster from Hobb. That was what she’d faced, more or less, since first descending into the Hole. Instead, they were both silent. Despite the ropes binding their arms behind their backs, Manthe had sagged against her husband’s side, and he’d managed to shift slightly to let her lay her head against his shoulder. Gwenna realized, as she stared at the married couple, that she’d never seen them outside the flickering firelight of the cave. They looked older in the sunlight, exhausted. Even Hobb, who had seemed so strong in the shadows, was obviously well past his best fighting years. Manthe didn’t look terrified anymore; her dark eyes were weary, resigned.

“Spare us the charade,” Hobb murmured, meeting Gwenna’s gaze. “We all know where this ends.”

“I want to know why,” Gwenna said again.

For a long time, she thought he would refuse to answer. He turned away, pressed his lips to his wife’s head, just where her graying hair met her brow. She closed her eyes and smiled weakly-the first smile Gwenna had ever seen from the woman. After a long time, Hobb sighed, and turned back to Gwenna.

“You think you understand good and evil. Right and wrong. Justice and betrayal.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you do. I’ll tell you one thing, though, that you don’t understand: love.”

He shook his head, as though he himself were surprised at the notion.

“I would do anything for Manthe. I thought your idiocy was going to get her hurt. Killed. I did what I could to protect her.”

“You were wrong,” Gwenna said, forcing down whatever stone was rising in her throat.

He shrugged again. “That’s clear now. It wasn’t then.”

“But…”

“I’m done explaining,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not something you can explain.”

He turned away. His wife looked up, met his eyes, and smiled wider.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“As am I, my love,” he replied gently.

They kissed tenderly and for a long time, ignoring Gwenna, ignoring everyone, as though for just that moment they were alone, unbound, free, as though the bright, unfeeling blade of justice were not waiting just a pace away.

* * *

“If I never have to do that again, it’ll be too soon,” Gwenna said.

Talal nodded, refilled her wooden tankard, and passed it back to her.

After the executions, Gwenna had spent the entire afternoon in the ocean. She swam the circuit from Qarsh to Hook and back three times, until she finally felt the salt waves had washed the blood from her skin, her scalp, from beneath her nails, until the trembling was gone from her arms, replaced by honest exhaustion. When she finally waded out of the water onto the beach by the Kettral headquarters, Talal and Annick were waiting. The sniper was holding tankards and, instead of her bow, a long staff of something that looked like bone. Talal had a small wooden barrel beneath his arm.

“Someone please tell me we’re going to get fantastically drunk,” Gwenna said as she slicked the seawater from her skin.

“We’re going to get fantastically drunk,” Talal said.

Gwenna glanced at Annick, then down at the tankards-three of them. “The last time I checked, you didn’t drink beer. You always claimed it messed up your shooting.”

Annick shrugged. “That’s when we’re training. Or on a mission.”

“Which is pretty much always.”

“Not tonight,” the sniper said. “Besides, I could drink half that barrel and still shoot better than anyone within five hundred miles.”

Talal chuckled quietly. “Was that a boast, Annick?”

“Just a fact.”

“What about that?” Gwenna asked, pointing at the pale staff.

“Kettral bone,” Annick replied. “Stronger than wood, lighter. All Kettral snipers make their own bow after the Trial. I never had the chance.”

Gwenna stared. “Tell me you didn’t slaughter one of our very few remaining birds so that you could have a slightly better bow.”

“It’s from the storeroom. And the bow will be much better. Not slightly better.”

Talal just shook his head, while Gwenna tried to imagine what that might mean.

“Do you think there’s a limit,” she asked finally, “to the distance from which you’d like to be able to kill people?”

The sniper’s brow wrinkled, as though she were pondering a nonsensical question. “No.”

They spent the evening and the first half of the night out on the breakwater at the harbor’s head. Gwenna threw stones into the waves, Annick worked her bone bow stave with her belt knife, and Talal kept refilling the tankards when they were dry. For just a while, it was possible to forget the corpses of the traitors they’d burned, the people they’d lost, the justice they’d meted out. It was almost possible to forget everything, to believe they were still cadets shirking some miserable assignment, that when they finished the barrel they would stumble back along the uneven stones of the breakwater to find the Eyrie whole and buzzing with life-men and women in the ring, in the mess hall, coming and going from the barracks. They might run into Valyn and Laith, the Flea or Gent or Blackfeather Finn. They might pull third watch for absconding, but that would be the worst of it. No one would ask them to settle the big issues, to solve the questions of life and death. That was what command was for.

Only now we are the command, Gwenna thought, staring at the lights of Hook where they reflected off the black water of the sound.

“How did it happen?” she muttered drunkenly, aloud.

“Which part?” Talal asked.

Gwenna waved a hand around her, trying to indicate Qarsh, the Islands, the whole busted world. “This.”

“What?” the leach asked, nudging her in the ribs. “A year ago you didn’t expect to be running the entire Eyrie?”

“I’m not,” Gwenna protested.

“You are,” Annick said, without looking up from her bow.

“That’s insane.”

The sniper just shrugged.

“Annick’s right,” Talal said, voice sober, subdued. “According to Kaden, Daveen Shaleel made it out, but she’s down in the Waist somewhere, if she’s even still alive. We are here.”

“So you run it,” Gwenna snapped.

The leach shook his head. “You’re the Wing leader. You’re in charge.”

“I don’t want this.”

“When did that start mattering?” Annick asked. “We’re soldiers. We do what we have to. Wanting doesn’t come into it.”

“What a comfort.”

“I wasn’t trying to be comforting.”

“I know that, Annick,” Gwenna snapped. She hurled another rock into the water. It disappeared, the splash swallowed by the relentless wash of the waves. Behind them somewhere, bunked down in the old Eyrie barracks, were seventeen men and women, cadets who had become washouts who had become, finally, Kettral. They’d survived the fight against Jakob Rallen, but that was hardly the last fight.

“They’re gonna wish they’d never left Arim,” Gwenna muttered.

“Maybe,” Talal said. “Maybe not.”

Annick slipped a bowstring from her pocket, bent the newly finished stave, and fit the string to the bow. She’d carried an arrow with her, all the way out to the end of the breakwater. Gwenna watched as the sniper nocked it silently, drew the bow, then let fly directly at the moon. The feathered shaft climbed against pale light, climbed higher than any normal arrow, impossibly high, then dropped out of sight.

“Well, that was a waste of an arrow,” Gwenna said.

Annick shrugged. “It’s nice, once in a while, to shoot at something you can’t hit.”

Talal chuckled.

After a moment, Gwenna kicked back the last of her ale, then set the tankard on the stone. “All right. We’ve got five birds. Which means five Wings.”

“The numbers don’t quite work out,” Talal observed.

“So they don’t quite work out. We stock up tonight with munitions, blades, and blacks. We’re in the air at first light.”

The leach raised his eyebrows. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going where they need us,” Gwenna replied. “We’re going where the fight is.”