The Last Mortal Bond

27

“I can’t do it,” Quick Jak said quietly, staring at the milk-pale monster flailing on the stone floor of the cavern.

The creature was fully trussed, and yet even captive, even tied, the slarn was a nightmare to turn the strongest stomach, slick, and twisted, and twisting. Like some sick fuck grafted together the worst parts of a wolf, a snake, and a man-sized salamander, Gwenna reflected. The slarn’s raking claws were long as her thumb, the teeth too many and too jagged for that gaping mouth, but the teeth and claws weren’t the worst of it. The worst part was the eyes, or rather, the blank swath of skin where the eyes should have been.

Men and women the world over revered Bedisa as a gentle, loving goddess, the tender midwife of all living things. It was worth remembering, however, that in addition to the beasts of the forests and the light-winged birds of the air, Bedisa also made monsters to prowl the cold, dark places of the world, that she who knit the stuff of human souls had also sculpted this horrific vision with its too-white, glistening flesh. It seemed to Gwenna that if the goddess wanted to fill the world with life, she might’ve gone a little heavier on the feathers and lips, a little lighter on the poison and claws, but then, there wasn’t much point in second-guessing the gods. The world was the way it was; some parts of it you could relax and enjoy; some parts you just had to kill.

The other rebels had gathered in a rough circle around the slarn, staring at it silently, awe and horror scribbled on their faces, amazement in their eyes. They’d fought the slarn before, but in the mad fury of a fight people didn’t always really see a thing. Well, they’re seeing it now, Gwenna thought. Seeing it, and, judging from the horror on their faces, wishing they weren’t. They’d heard about the slarn over on Arim, but hearing about it was useless. Words might manage to capture something of the way the creatures looked, how they moved, but you could never describe to someone how those things made you feel deep in the soft inner part of you.

“I couldn’t do it then,” Quick Jak continued, taking a half step back from the writhing slarn, holding his hands up in surrender. “And I can’t do it now.”

“Yes,” Gwenna said grimly, “you can. You will. We didn’t haul that fucking thing out of the guts of this cave just to play touch and tell.”

It had taken her, and Annick, and Talal hours to find the slarn. When they finally got it out and up into the cavern where the rebels had made their camp, Gwenna was ready to throw the ’Kent-kissing creature on the bonfire and have done with the whole idea of the Trial. The slarn was only a young adolescent, Talal had worked up some sort of kenning to keep its jaws locked for a few breaths, and the beast had still almost taken her arm off when she jumped on top of it.

Killing the creatures was tricky enough. Capturing the fucking thing had almost finished her. She’d barely managed to keep hold of its back as it thrashed, barely managed to stay clear of the jaws and the claws as the beast smashed her into the walls, tried to scrape her off on the floor, barely managed to wrap an arm around the slarn’s throat, then roll so the writhing creature was on top of her, belly-up, raking the air with furious claws. Another couple heartbeats and it would have broken free, but Annick and Talal didn’t give it a couple heartbeats. While Gwenna cursed and clutched the thing tighter, they managed to truss the long rear legs, then the shorter front ones. By then Talal was sweating like an ox, and his kenning, instead of fading, just snapped. Then, of course, the miserable beast went at Gwenna all over again, ignoring its trussed limbs, twisting and snarling, trying to sink a tooth into her as she rolled free.

And of course, after all the wrestling, dragging the slarn half a mile upward through the twisting passageways of the Hole had taken a toll on all three of them. One of the claws had hooked Talal, leaving a long gash down his arm; the long, muscular tail knocked Annick a dozen feet off a ledge; and the sheer weight of the thing falling on her over and over had jammed two of Gwenna’s fingers, fingers that blazed with pain as she wrenched them back into proper alignment, then settled into a dull, constant ache. The physical effort, however, did something to distract from the horror of the slarn itself, and it was only as they lugged the writhing creature into the light of the bonfire, only when Gwenna saw the shocked and horrified expressions on the faces of the washouts, only when she smelled their fear, hot and rotten, that she felt the full weight of what she meant to do.

“You want it to bite us?” Qora asked, pulling Gwenna’s attention away from Quick Jak. The woman’s shaved scalp was slick with sweat, dark skin glistening in the firelight. “You want us to let it bite us?”

“You wanted to be Kettral?” Gwenna asked. She nodded toward the slarn. “This is how you get to be Kettral.”

Qora was staring, they were all staring, but only a few were looking at the beast pinioned in front of them. Most of them were looking at her, Gwenna realized; they were staring with a mixture of awe and fear, as though some vicious killer had suddenly appeared in their midst, some implacable warrior they were powerless to resist. The whole thing made her sick.

“What the fuck did you expect from Hull’s Trial?” she demanded. “A short essay on your favorite line from the Tactics?”

“It’s poison,” Manthe said from beyond the ambit of the circle. She refused to come within twenty paces of the creature, but she’d risen to her feet as though getting ready to flee, had one hand on the pommel of her sword while the other kneaded the filthy hem of her tunic over and over. Her eyes burned, fever-bright behind her tangled hair, and though her voice trembled, it was loud enough for everyone to hear. “You remember Carl over on Arim? Poor old shaking Carl? This is what happened to him. This.”

Gwenna made herself nod calmly, made herself meet the frightened eyes of the washouts. “Manthe is right, but she’s not telling you the whole story. The bite of a slarn is poison, but there is a way to cure it. There are eggs in this cave, slarn eggs. Those eggs are the antidote. Find one, drink it, and the poison goes away.”

“Then why do it at all?” Qora demanded. “It’s pointless.”

“No,” Gwenna replied. “It is not. Something about the poison and the egg, about the combination of the two … it changes a person. It makes you stronger and faster. You can feel things, hear things you’ve never heard before. It’s those advantages that make the Kettral the Kettral-those just as much as the birds and the blades. They’re part of the reason we were able to go down there and drag this one out.”

A murmur of shock, of disbelief ran around the circle.

“Tell them, Manthe,” Gwenna said.

The woman backed away, shaking her head, out of the firelight and into the darkness. “This is madness. I’ll have no part of it.”

Talal stepped forward instead. The ugly seam down his arm had already clotted and begun to scab over. He held it up to the firelight, where everyone could see, then ran a finger along the damaged flesh. “It’s true,” he said simply. “I took this wound barely an hour ago. We are asking you to believe a shocking thing, but we can offer our own bodies as testament to the truth.”

As usual, Gwenna marveled at the steadiness in his voice, the grave, quiet confidence in those dark eyes. If I had any brains, she thought, I’d let him do all the talking. I’d only open my mouth when we really needed to piss someone off.

The fear-stink still rolled off the assembled soldiers, but there was something else there, too, a smell she couldn’t quite place: awe, maybe, or hope.

Then Jak started up again. “I know that you’re telling the truth,” the flier said quietly. “It’s what they told us at my own Trial. But we could die down there.”

And just like that, it was impossible to keep quiet.

“You could die just about anywhere,” Gwenna snapped. “You could die right here in this cavern. The fire could go out and the slarn could come. Rallen could smoke you out or starve you out. You could eat a hunk of rancid gull meat and die curled up on the floor shitting out your own guts.”

Strangely, suddenly, she thought of Pyrre, of the woman’s casual indifference to her own inevitable doom. For the first time, it actually seemed sensible, enviable. Maybe it was even beautiful to live so close to the ugly fact of death and yet to feel so little fear. Gwenna racked her mind for what Pyrre might say to these terrified soldiers. Probably nothing. She’d probably just laugh at the lot of them and walk off.

She took a deep breath, gathered her calm, tried all over again to sound reasonable. “The thing is-” she began.

Hobb cut her off. “The thing is, these people aren’t Kettral.” Manthe still trembled in the far shadows, her back pressed against the rock wall. Her husband, however, had approached the group while Gwenna was haranguing Jak. He stood just beyond the circle now, thick arms crossed over his chest, surveying the washouts scornfully. “They’re not ready for the Trial. They might never be ready. I told you this before.”

Gwenna turned to face the man. The slarn thrashed on the floor between them, but she stepped forward anyway, straight over the flailing beast, taking the straightest line toward the other Kettral. The other soldiers, sensing the danger, parted to give her room. Hobb didn’t step back, but he dropped a hand to the handle of the sword at his waist. Gwenna didn’t bother with her own sword, flicking free her belt knife instead when she was a pace and a half away.

To his credit, Hobb was just as quick with his own weapon, but a sword is longer than a knife, and takes longer to draw. Just as he pulled it clear of the sheath, Gwenna slammed it aside, stepped into the gap, and laid her knife’s edge against his throat. “You did tell me before,” she said. “I remember. You told me they weren’t ready. And I told you they are. They trained as Kettral, every single one of them. When Rallen came with his second chance, they stepped forward to take it. When Rallen played his cards and started his killing, these people were the ones who fought back, who resisted, and who got away.”

Hobb started to respond, eyes wide with rage, but Gwenna pressed her knife deeper into his neck.

“And it wasn’t because of you and your fucking wife, whatever you told them. They’re not alive because of you. They are alive because they are strong. Because they are survivors. What you have helped them to do is hide. You’ve convinced them to quit hunting and allowed them to become hunted. They are fucking losing because of you. And so if I hear another word about how they’re not ready, how they’re not Kettral, how they can’t do what they need to do, I am going to cut your throat, and then I’m going to cut your wife’s throat, and I am going to feed both your useless, cowardly carcasses to the slarn.”

If Hobb was frightened of the knife at his neck, he didn’t show it. Instead, his lip curled up in a sneer. “You fool,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “You little fool.”

Gwenna met the man’s furious eyes, wondering if she was going to have to make good on her threat, but before she could respond, Qora spoke from behind her, the woman’s voice quiet but clear above the sounds of the slarn scraping against the floor, the crackling and shifting of the fire. “I’ll do it.”

Gwenna didn’t turn. She kept her knife on Hobb’s throat, ready to open it if he twitched. Hobb’s eyes, however, moved past her, toward the washouts gathered around the slarn.

“Listen to this, and listen good,” he spat. “The fact that one bitch barely past her own Trial tells you you’re good doesn’t make you good. I flew missions with the Kettral for more than a decade, with real Kettral, and I’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear: you’re not Kettral. You’re slower. You’re weaker. You’re dumber. And if you follow her,” he raised his chin toward Gwenna without bothering to look at her, “Jakob Rallen is going to cut you to ribbons.”

Again, it was Qora who replied. “Then I’ll die fighting. That’s what Kettral do, right? They die fighting, not hiding.”

For once, Gwenna managed to keep her own mouth shut. She waited for Hobb’s eyes to return to her, then she just smiled. The man spat past her, onto the stone, then turned, indifferent to the small slice her knife left on his throat, stalking back to the far end of the cavern where his wife waited in the shadows. Manthe hissed something urgent and desperate when he reached her-all Gwenna could make out was … careful … and … my love … and then Hobb wrapped a brusque hand around her shoulders, ignoring Gwenna and the rest as though they’d ceased to exist.

Gwenna exhaled slowly, sheathed her knife. When she turned, Qora had already taken a step into the human circle, a step toward the thrashing slarn.

“I’ll do it,” she said again. Then, before anyone could respond, as though dragged forward by her own fear, she darted the last few paces, baring her arm to the creature. Gwenna watched as the slarn, scenting flesh, twisted in its bonds, then brought those jaws to bear. Startled by the movement, Qora jerked back with a shout. She was fast, but not fast enough. The beast snagged two fingers on her left hand, severing them at the second joint, shrieking that high, hair-raising shriek just at the edge of hearing. Qora straightened, staring half in shock at the blood welling from the stumps of her fingers, then pulled back.

Gwenna swallowed her curse, and crossed to her. It wasn’t a bad wound-clean, tendon neatly severed, no crushed bone-but it was a wound, all the same, worse than required for the Trial, and it was bleeding badly. The others had gone abruptly silent, as though the horror was lodged in their throats. Gwenna could smell the fear, hot and rotten. They were ready to break.

“Look,” she said, seizing Qora by the wrist, pressing down on the artery even as she held the woman’s hand in the air for the others to see. “This is what you’re afraid of.”

“Her fingers…,” someone gasped.

“I know,” Gwenna replied. “It got two of her fingers.” She looked slowly from one to the next, pronouncing the next words as clearly as she could. “So what?”

They gaped at her, unable to parse the question.

“So what?” Gwenna said again. She could hear Talal moving behind her, stirring at the fire for some reason. She ignored him, turning to Qora instead.

“You can still stand, right?”

The woman nodded shakily.

“And you can talk?”

Another nod.

“Let them hear you talk.”

After a long pause, Qora ground out the words between gritted teeth. “I want to gut that fucking thing.”

Gwenna smiled.

“Hear that? Not only can she walk and talk, she wants to fight. You’re all frightened. I understand that, but I want you to look at this, and to keep looking until you understand.” She gave Qora’s mangled hand a little shake. “This is what you’re afraid of and it is nothing. Am I right, Qora?”

Please, Hull, she prayed silently, let me be right.

Qora licked her lips, then, after a moment, she nodded.

“We need to cauterize it,” Talal said quietly. The leach had come up behind Gwenna’s shoulder. He held a red-hot belt knife in his hand. Gwenna grimaced. Qora had shown some grit so far, but the burning was going to hurt a lot more than the original wound. To her shock, however, Qora looked over at Talal, met his eyes, then nodded. “I’ll do it myself.”

Talal started to object. “It’ll be-”

“She’ll do it,” Gwenna said. “She’s earned it.”

And they need to see this.

Talal hesitated, then handed the woman the knife. Qora stared at the glowing steel as though it were a snake. Then, with a bellow of defiance, pressed it against her ravaged flesh. Blood hissed, bubbled. The stench of seared meat filled the air, and after a moment she dropped the knife, sagging to one knee. Then slowly, painfully, she stood again.

“All right,” she said quietly, meeting Gwenna’s eyes. For once there was no bluster in her voice, no anger. “I did it. Now what?”

Gwenna nodded, clapped the woman on the shoulder. The extra stiffness in Qora’s spine, the proud tilt of her chin-it was worth a couple fingers. Gwenna studied the other washouts, pausing on Jak. The flier’s face had gone pale as the slarn’s belly. Qora might have found resolve in her wound, but clearly the sight had only sickened the flier further.

“I go down now?” Qora asked. “Go looking for the egg?”

Gwenna shook her head. “No. You don’t go in alone.”

“That’s the way they did it during my Trial,” Jak said. “One at a time.”

“Yeah,” Gwenna said. “We got that shit, too. And it was stupid. You’re going to fight as a Wing, you’re going to die, if it comes to dying, as a Wing. I figure you can do this, too, as a Wing. Now … who’s going to join Qora?”

There was no sound but the fire and the hammering heartbeats of two dozen washouts. Gwenna looked from face to stricken face, hauled in a deep breath, trying to catch a whiff of the resolve, or anger, or courage they so desperately needed. No one moved. No one met her eyes.

I was wrong, she thought bleakly. I played it all wrong.

From the far end of the cavern came Hobb’s low, derisive laugh. “I told you,” he growled. “They’re not ready.”

Gwenna considered killing the man. It wouldn’t fix any of the washouts, but it would feel good to tackle a problem she knew how to solve. She couldn’t fix cowardice, couldn’t fix a lifetime of failures, couldn’t find the right words to forge pig iron into true steel. She could, however, face a live man with a sword in his hand and make him dead. That, at least, was something she understood.

Before she’d moved, however, Delka stepped forward quietly.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Gwenna turned to stare at her, this woman in her early fifties, her hair more gray than brown, the wrinkles deep around her eyes, dark skin spotted from long days in the sun. She smelled frightened, but she didn’t flinch as she rolled up her sleeve, baring her arm for the slarn. She studied the monster for a moment, then met Gwenna’s eyes, and, shockingly, she smiled.

“I’m ready,” she said again. “I’ve been getting ready for this a long, long time.”

* * *

In the end, amazingly, they all stepped forward. All but Quick Jak, who stood trembling like an autumn leaf, eyes fixed on the blood-spattered stone. Most of the rebels were already below, hunting in groups of four or five for the slarn eggs that would save them. Three of the bitten soldiers stood at the gaping mouth of the tunnel, clutching their fresh wounds, waiting impatiently for Jak to step up, bare his pale skin for the writhing slarn, then join them. Jak, however, was not stepping up.

“It’s time,” Gwenna said, trying to balance her voice on the narrow edge between encouragement and scorn. “Your turn, Jak.”

He didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to hear her. Instead he watched the slarn, staring at that hideous, eyeless face, his own eyes pried wide with the horror, helpless as a mouse caught in the snake’s cold gaze. He’d watched the others, watched every one of them as they stepped up to be savaged by the creature. Gwenna had taken that for a good sign; he hadn’t looked away, hadn’t even flinched, really. Now she wasn’t so sure. That stare of his seemed locked to his face. He wasn’t looking because he wanted to; he was looking because his fear compelled him.

“Jak,” she said, crossing the rough stone floor to grab him by the jerkin. “It’s time.”

She had to shake him to break his gaze, to get him to look at her instead of the blood-soaked slarn. When he did, she knew that it was hopeless. The terror had him, had him utterly. It was seared into his eyes. She could smell it, thick in his fetid sweat. She could hear it in his rapid breathing, shallow and far too fast as it rasped between bared teeth, chapped lips. He wasn’t going to do it, couldn’t do it. In another circumstance, she would have let him go, would have shoved him away, indulged briefly in her own pity and disgust for the failure of a man who could have been a soldier, then let it go.

But we need him, she thought. Hull help us all, we need him.

There were two other fliers in the group: Delka and a fat, ginger-haired idiot named Corantan. The fight against Rallen, when it came, might well rest in large part on the birds and the people flying them.

And so you want a coward in the mix, a busted-up excuse for a man who lets his panic paralyze him?

She didn’t, but then, wanting didn’t much come into the question. According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius when you put him on a bird’s back. He’d made it all the way through training, after all, made it all the way to the Trial. Despite his current paralysis, he couldn’t be a complete fuckup. She needed him in the battle against Rallen, needed someone to wrangle the Dawn King, to make the best use of the fastest, most powerful bird, and after that … Gwenna had tried to put the thought out of her head, but the truth was there, bald, ugly, and undeniable: after Laith’s death, her own Wing needed another flier. Delka might be all right, but Delka seemed too old, too soft, too gentle.

Gwenna just couldn’t get out of her mind the memory of Jak swimming the midnight swells, that strong, efficient, almost effortless stroke, the way he wasn’t even breathing hard when he climbed out of the ocean and shook off the last of the spray. He could be so good.… It was like finding a beautiful blade, perfectly balanced but gone to rust on the surface. You didn’t throw away a blade like that. You got a stone and you scoured it clean.

“It’s time,” she said again.

He looked at her, then dropped his eyes. She could almost taste his shame, sick-sweet in the back of her mouth. Those strong shoulders slumped forward as he shook his head.

“I can’t, Gwenna. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care what happened then, and I don’t care how sorry you are, you need to do this. Your friends need you to do it.” She almost admitted that she needed him to do it, but stopped herself. “Let’s go,” she said instead.

“I can’t,” he insisted, his voice quiet but horribly tight. Anger roughened those syllables now, and he jerked away from her hand on his shoulder. “Just leave it, all right?”

“No,” Gwenna said. “It is not all right, and I won’t leave it.”

“Gwenna,” Talal said. The leach stood a few paces away, his arms crossed over his chest, dark eyes grave.

“Don’t interfere,” she snapped.

“Hull’s Trial is a voluntary crucible,” Talal continued. “To make it anything else is to turn it into a sort of torture.”

“Do you see me forcing him?” she demanded, holding her hands up.

Over by the tunnel mouth leading down into the dark, the others watched them, urgency and reluctance warring on their faces. Gwenna could remember what they felt, the slow, mesmerizing burn of the poison gnawing its way up through the flesh, up, up, up, like some awful, mindless acid stupidly seeking the heart.

“Every heartbeat you delay,” she said, leaning in so close that Jak couldn’t avoid her face, “is killing your Wing.”

“They’re not my Wing.”

“They are until this Trial is over,” Gwenna spat. “And you are letting them down.”

His explosion happened instantly and without warning. One moment he was hanging his head, shame and terror steaming off of him. The next, he’d seized her by the shoulders, was screaming into her face, his lips drawn back in a rabid rictus, his spittle hitting her in the face.

“That’s why I’m not going to do it, Gwenna! I’m not Kettral. I’ve never been Kettral. I was good with the birds and that was it! And if you think I’m letting someone down now, wait until it comes to a real fight. You saw what happened back on Hook, but you don’t understand. It’s like that every fucking time. I don’t want it to be that way. I hate it. I hate it. But I can’t help it, Gwenna. The fear, it just … gets me. It’s like a claw closed tight around my heart, and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, all I can think about is getting out. Getting safe! If this was something I could cut out of myself with a knife,” he said, dropping her shoulders to bare his chest, as though exposing some treacherous organ, “I would start cutting. I would carve it out if it killed me. But it’s not.” He shook his head, and finally his voice subsided. “It’s been there all my life, since I was a tiny boy. This fear is part of every memory I have.”

“I don’t accept that,” Gwenna said finally.

“It doesn’t matter if you accept it,” he said. “It’s real. It’s an ugly, disgusting fact, but it’s a fact.”

“Well, I’ll tell you another fact,” Gwenna replied grimly. “If you want to save yourself, if you want to survive, you’ve got to go down in those tunnels.”

“Gwenna,” Talal said, voice harder this time.

“I’m not going down there,” Jak said. “I quit. I refuse the Trial.”

“No,” Gwenna said, spinning easily on one foot, sweeping the flier’s ankle, catching him in a half lock before he hit the ground, wrapping her legs around his chest, then flipping him toward the thrashing slarn. He tried to resist, made a good show of it, actually. He was strong, and if they’d been wrestling to a pin, or a blackout, he would have given her a run for her money. She didn’t need to pin him, though. Didn’t need to knock him out. All she needed to do was hold him half a heartbeat as the slarn’s jaws snapped shut on his forearm, tearing away a flap of skin and muscle. Jak bellowed, and she let him loose, rolling away and to her feet, dropping into a fighter’s crouch in case he came after her.

Instead, he was staring at his arm. Blood wept down the skin, puddling on the floor. The creature gnashed its teeth, searching for more, and the flier pulled back, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Hull’s Trial is voluntary,” he said quietly. “You can’t force someone to do it.”

“No one’s forcing you,” Gwenna replied. “You have a choice. You can let the poison gut you, or you can go with your fucking Wing.”

* * *

“That was wrong,” Talal said.

“Spare me the lesson in morality,” Gwenna spat. She stared into the bonfire, following the shifting shapes as logs turned to embers, then the embers caved under their own weight, sending showers of spark and ash into the air. They’d fed the hungry fire half a dozen times since the last poisoned Wing, including Quick Jak, disappeared down Hull’s gullet. It was impossible to gauge time down in the Hole, but it seemed someone should have come back. “I know it’s not the way the Eyrie used to do it, but we need him, Talal.”

“We do not,” Annick said. She had her bow in hand. Whether she was guarding against a sudden appearance of slarn, or against Manthe and Hobb, who were crouched in whispered conversation over at their corner of the cavern, Gwenna couldn’t say. “He is the weakest of the entire lot. And they are all weak.”

“He’s not weak,” Gwenna insisted. “He is afraid.”

The sniper shook her head as though the statement didn’t make sense. “Fear is a weakness. A dangerous weakness.”

“We all have weaknesses. I’m not saying Quick Jak is going to be the Flea someday, but he deserves a chance.”

“Chances are something that people need to take for themselves,” Talal pointed out. “Part of your reason for sending them down into the Hole in the first place was to build their confidence. It doesn’t build a man’s confidence to knock him down, then offer him up as meat for a beast that terrifies him.”

“I know,” Gwenna said, putting up a hand as though she could block the objection. “I understand that. But we all need a nudge sometimes. I was terrified my first barrel drop, couldn’t make myself undo the buckle. You know what Adaman Fane did? He cut the straps and shoved me off the talon. And I realized, as soon as I hit the water, that I could do it, that I’d done it. The next time, I did the buckles myself.”

“You are not Quick Jak,” Talal said quietly.

“Of course not. We’re all our own people.”

“That’s not what he means,” Annick said.

“Well, what the fuck does he mean?”

“I mean you’re … better suited to this,” Talal said.

“I’m not suited to it. Every ’Kent-kissing thing I’ve learned has been a struggle.”

“Maybe,” Annick said, cutting her off. The sniper pursed her lips, flicked her bowstring with a finger. The note echoed in the empty chamber. Annick waited for it to die out before she continued. “And still, you are what the Eyrie aims for when they train us. You’re the perfect Kettral.”

Gwenna stared at her. For a moment all words failed. “Are you fucking mad?” she managed finally.

“No,” Annick replied evenly. “I was there when we fought our way free of Long Fist. I saw you command the defense of Andt-Kyl. I saw you pull Qora out of the mess over on Hook.”

“I was improvising. Annick, I was making that shit up.”

Talal just laughed. The sudden mirth was both welcome and disconcerting. “That’s the point,” he said. “Kettral improvise. They fight on the fly. When the Flea put you in charge of the Wing, he did it for a reason. You’re good at this shit.”

Gwenna stared from one to the other, unsure what to make of the lump in her throat. Before she could get too emotional, however, the smile slipped off the leach’s face, and he was shaking his head.

“That’s what we’re trying to tell you about Jak. Just because something worked for you doesn’t mean it will work for him. I like the guy, too, Gwenna. I’m sorry he’s broken, but he is broken. You’re a great demolitions master and an even better Wing leader, but that doesn’t mean you can fix him.”

Annick nodded. “Keep trying, and someone’s going to get hurt. Killed.”

“That happens to Kettral,” Gwenna retorted. “We get killed.”

“Quick Jak’s not Kettral.”

Gwenna turned away, staring into the tunnel where it snaked away into the labyrinth below. When she finally managed to speak again, her own quiet words sounded strange in her ears, half desperate, half defiant:

“Not yet.”

* * *

By the time they’d heaped the central fire with wood another half-dozen times, the sniper’s warning was starting to look horribly prescient. All of the Wings had returned from the Hole-bloody, with broken fingers or twisted ankles, limping, leaning on one another, glancing over shoulders at some remembered terror, at a recollected triumph-all except for Quick Jak’s.

The rebels clustered around the fire, too exhausted, mostly, for the sharing of stories or the comparing of wounds. Some dozed off, while others went at the stores of dried meat and fruit with a vengeance. They looked more like weary workers at the end of a long harvest week in the fields than they did soldiers, but Gwenna could smell the satisfaction on them, could hear the new note of pride in their voices. Sure, she’d changed the rules of the Trial; sure, she’d given them plenty of light and sent them down in groups; sure, it was ten times easier than what Gwenna’s own class of cadets had faced. None of that mattered. Not to them. Not now. They’d faced the slarn, had gone down into the Hole panicked and poisoned, and then they had found what they were looking for and come back out. They had won.

All of them but Quick Jak and his three companions.

Gwenna had taken to pacing impatiently over by the tunnel mouth, eighteen steps to the ledge, turn, eighteen steps back. She’d tried stepping into that darkness and listening, but that made it worse. For someone with her hearing, there were a hundred sounds whispering up from the depths of the cave, water washing the cold stone, wind etching the stalactites, underground rivers rumbling in the rock’s throat. The sounds of Hull’s darkness-none of them human.

After she’d paced off the distance four or five hundred times, Delka came over to join her. Talal was busy tending to the wounded-wrapping bandages and splinting fingers-while Annick continued to stand watch against any number of hypothetical threats, the seen and the unseen. Both of them had given Gwenna her space when she finally shoved her way free of the fire and the questions both, leaving her to stalk back and forth in a cloud of her own doubt. Delka, however, had gone into the Hole before the whole scene with Jak. She had no idea what had happened, and a smile creased her lined face as she approached.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

Gwenna stared at her. The punctures in the woman’s arm had scabbed over, but she had other wounds-a gash across her scalp that left her face streaked with blood, a huge contusion on her left shoulder, purple so dark it was almost black except at the red, angry edges. Blood smeared her teeth. She looked like she’d spent half the night losing a rough fight, like she ought to be sleeping it off somewhere dark and quiet, not standing in front of Gwenna grinning. Not fucking thanking her.

“For what?” Gwenna demanded.

“For letting us do it. For encouraging us.”

“Encouraging…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head, remembering Quick Jak’s frantic thrashing as she held him down, imagining him and the others lost in the tunnels below, maybe dead already, ripped to fleshy ribbons by the slarn.

“You see anyone else when you were down there? Any of the … others?”

Delka met her eyes, shook her head slowly. “Just slarn. But we weren’t really looking, Gwenna. They could be finding the egg right now. They could be on their way up already.”

“Or they could be dead,” Gwenna said.

To her surprise, Delka nodded. “They could be dead,” she agreed, voice matter-of-fact. “That’s what it is to lead soldiers, Gwenna. Sometimes you make the right decision and people still get hurt. Sometimes they still die.”

“I understand that,” Gwenna growled. “I understand it better than you do. While you were eating sliced firefruit over on Arim, I was up to my elbows in blood fighting the Urghul in Andt-Kyl.” She could still hear Pikker John’s screams as the horses lashed to his limbs pawed the earth, tearing him apart. She could still see the captives, bound hand and foot, heads bent toward the dirt, helpless as statuary in the moment before her starshatter rent them to pieces. “I know you lose people in a fight, but this isn’t a fight.”

She glared at Delka a moment longer, then glanced into the darkness of the Hole once more. She could hear the river down there, groaning over the stone like something huge and in pain. She smelled blood, thick and hot on the back of her tongue; some of the stench came from the cavern behind her, where the returning men and women nursed their wounds, some from the warren of tunnels below.

“The Eyrie has always sent men and women into the Hole,” Delka said quietly. “They don’t always come out.”

Gwenna shook her head. “When the Eyrie sent us in we were trained. We were ready.”

The older woman laid a hand on Gwenna’s shoulder. “I don’t know the other three well, but Quick Jak and I used to run together over on Arim. He’s strong. He’s smart.”

“Is that enough?” Gwenna growled.

Delka spread her hands. “We’ll have to wait to find out.”

Gwenna shook her head curtly, seized a burning torch from its makeshift sconce near the entrance to the tunnel, then slipped a blade from the sheath on her back. “No,” she said quietly, stepping into the darkness before anyone could call her back. “We won’t.”

* * *

As it turned out, Delka was right. Gwenna found Jak less than a quarter mile below the cavern where the rebels made their camp, limping up the uneven stone, one blade bare and bloody, his own torch burned down to a guttering stump.

Thank Hull, she thought, relief flooding through her like light, like air. Then she saw his face, the awful shock scrawled across his features, looked past him into the deeper dark, listened for those other footfalls, for the three other soldiers who had gone down into the Hole with him, who weren’t coming out.

“They’re dead,” he said. His voice, too, sounded dead.

“How?” Gwenna asked, covering the distance between them at a lope.

Jak just shook his head.

“How?” she demanded, shoving her torch almost into his face, trying to read what had happened in the spatters of blood, in the dark soot smeared across his skin.

He stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean, how? There are monsters down there, you bitch. Bigger than the one you dragged up into the cavern, the one you fed our blood to.”

She shook her head, as though to refuse the truth. “The others all made it. The others came back.”

“Maybe the others were better.”

“No,” she said. “They weren’t. You’re one of the only washouts who actually made it all the way to the Trial. You’re younger than most of them, and you’re stronger. I’ve seen you swim.”

“It’s not swimming down there,” he said, staring at the naked blade as though he had woken up only moments before, had just now discovered it clutched in his hand. “It’s a lot uglier than swimming.”

“What happened?”

“The slarn happened,” Jak said, shaking his head, eyes wide, mind obviously lost in the memory. “Half a dozen of them. We found the nest. Enough eggs to go around. Thought we got lucky. We were actually laughing as we drank from them, slapping each other on the back.” He closed his eyes. “Then they hit us.”

“And did you fight back?”

“Of course,” he said quietly. “What else could we do?”

What else could we do? Gwenna stared at him. The flier was spattered with blood, but not much of it seemed to be his. There was that initial wound, wet and messy on his arm, and a handful of scratches. Nothing more. Nothing to indicate a bare-knuckle fight to the death.

What else could we do?

“You could run,” Gwenna said. Even in her own ears, her voice sounded like a knife sliding across stone.

Jak opened his eyes, met her stare. “There was no need. Not in the end.”

“You killed six slarn?”

“I didn’t do it by myself. Helli killed at least three before the big one tore out her throat. Gim got one, I think. All I know is that they were all dead, finally. I was the only one left. Me and the largest of those monsters, and he was already all cut up. Dumb beast, practically dead on his feet and didn’t know it. I finished him.”

Gwenna studied him. She could smell the grief, but grief for what? For seeing his companions killed or for leaving them? He’d frozen up that night in Hook, had all but abandoned Qora to the mercy of Rallen’s thugs. Was it really likely that he’d behaved any differently, that he’d behaved better in the tight, twisting darkness of the Hole? Gwenna had shoved him down into the cave’s gut hoping that could be true, but all those hours pacing back and forth in front of the fire had eroded her hope. Despair had had hours to whisper its own sibilant song, insistent as a river undercutting the bank: He’s a coward. He’s a coward, and you were a fool.

“You don’t believe me,” Jak said, shaking his head wearily. “You think I ran.”

Gwenna took a deep breath. “Take me to the bodies. They deserve to be burned.”

Not just that. A few minutes studying the dead, and she’d know what had happened, who had fought and who had fled.

“I can’t.”

“We’ll find them,” Gwenna insisted grimly. “Just a matter of a little backtracking.”

“I didn’t forget the way. The bodies aren’t there. I threw them into a river that carved its way through the cave.”

Gwenna’s jaw throbbed. She realized she was grinding her teeth together, biting down so hard on her anger that pain lanced down the back molars.

“Why did you do that?”

“I wasn’t going to leave them for the slarn. They’re people. Not meat.”

And now they’re gone, Gwenna thought bleakly. The bodies and the truth with them.

“I didn’t run,” Jak said, eyes weary but defiant.

She opened her mouth, ready to press the point, then shook her head, turning abruptly on her heel. There was no way to get at the facts, not anymore. And even if the flier had run, even if he had frozen up or abandoned his companions, it was Gwenna Sharpe who had forced him down there in the first place.