The Last Mortal Bond

43

Before any fight, there was the waiting. In the moment of violence, Valyn could kill as well as anyone else, but in the long hours of preparation, he was lost in his own blindness. He could hear Huutsuu and her riders chopping trees in the forest somewhere to the east, could feel the earth vibrate as they hauled the huge logs into place to block gates in the old fortress, and doorways. He could smell the sweat pouring off of the men and women, the lather of the horses, the sweet resin of the newly felled firs. He felt it all around him, the coming violence building like a summer storm, and yet he could do nothing to prepare.

While the Urghul worked, he walked the length of the old stone wall-108 paces from the embankment on the west, where the land fell away sharply into the Haag, to the squat tower in the east, beyond which the ground grew mossy, then spongy, so soft that he sank halfway to his knees. Old Mierten had understood terrain-that much was clear. Hundreds of years on, it was still a good place to fight.

The fort itself was another matter. Valyn could pull crumbling mortar from between the stones with his bare fingers. The wall was high enough to stop the horsemen-ten feet in most places-but when he climbed atop the walk, loose stones rocked beneath his feet. Half the ramparts that would shield the defenders from arrows and spears had fallen away, leaving only clusters of stone to crouch behind, and those were tenuous at best. He dislodged one with a casual shove, listening to it scrape against the north face of the wall, then thud into the dirt. It might be possible to drop a few more on the Urghul when the assault came, but that would mean destroying the wall even further, like ripping off your own arm to use it as a club.

Squat towers punctuated the wall every thirty paces. Originally they would have offered archers a little extra range, provided elevated platforms for the fort’s commander or a welcome shelter for the wounded. Now, they were mostly falling down. The jumbled stones blocked easy passage along the top of the wall, passage that might prove crucial to the defenders as the battle ebbed and flowed. Valyn couldn’t build barricades or dig trenches, but he could clear the battlements, and so that was what he did for the better part of the morning. Those blocks he could lift, he placed on the ruined ramparts. The stones would be good for a few shattered skulls at the very least. Some of the pieces were too heavy to lift, but Valyn did his best to muscle them out of the way.

The work left his shoulders sore and his hands bloody, but he kept at it, even when the towers were more or less passable. It was that or sit in the midday darkness and wait. He was kicking the last of the gravel off the ledge with his boot-even an egg-sized stone could mean lost footing or a broken ankle-when the Annurians finally arrived. He’d heard them when they were still a mile off, boots thudding into the earth. As they drew closer he could smell the blood- and sweat-soaked wool, the leather and polished steel. And the fear. The Annurian soldiers reeked of fear.

It seemed impossible that they were able to keep going. That much fear should have crushed them, unstrung their legs, left them gibbering in the dirt to be ground beneath the horses’ hooves when the Urghul rode south. Valyn paused his work, stretched his neck and shoulders as he stared into the darkness that was the north. What’s keeping them going? How have they not quit?

As they drew closer, he could hear the ragged breathing, the pounding of dozens of hearts, quieter than the boots, but more frantic. And he could hear their voices. They weren’t really talking-none of the men had the breath left for conversation-but every so often one would offer a word, a fragment of a phrase:

Steady there, Tem.

When we gonna start running?

Told you you were gettin’ fat.…

It was all mixed up, the earnest exhortations with the bleak jokes, the choked-off curses when soldiers stumbled followed immediately by the goading of the others urging their fellows on. Valyn stood alone at the wall’s top, the wind cold on his face, listening. And there’s your answer, he thought. He could remember that feeling, the strength that came when you stood shoulder to shoulder with someone else, sharing the struggle. He could remember swimming the sound between Qarsh and Hook with Gent, running punishment miles all night long with Laith, sitting long, shivering watches with Ha Lin during their training missions in the north. He could remember that strength, but it had been a long time since he stood beside a friend or ally. What had kept him alive, in the long night since Andt-Kyl, was something deeper and darker than any human bond, something stitched into his flesh, something he could never share.

As the legionaries clattered to a halt in front of the fort, Valyn glanced down. His knuckles throbbed. He realized he’d been punching the top of the wall over and over, lightly but persistently, testing his flesh against the stone. Stupid, he thought, wiping the blood on his furs. There would be plenty of fighting soon enough with no need to war against the heedless walls.

From below, the Flea’s voice cut through the wind. “Welcome to Mierten’s Fort.”

The Wing commander was on the ground north of the wall, had been working on the barricades. Even as he spoke, he kept working. Valyn could hear him pounding yet another spiked stake into the earth, parceling out his greeting between the blows. For a moment there was just silence. Then a new voice responded, a voice thick with wariness.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Anjin,” the Flea replied. “You have the command here?”

“I do.”

“You have a name, Commander?”

The man hesitated. “Belton,” he said after a moment. “You have a rank?”

“Kettral,” the Flea replied.

A wave of murmurs ran through the troops at that. The Flea didn’t elaborate, didn’t stop working.

“If you’re Kettral,” Belton demanded after a pause, “then who are they?”

“Those are the Urghul,” the Flea said. “On our side. The good Urghul.”

Belton spat. “No such fucking thing. What are you doing with a batch of horse-fuckers? Where’s your bird?”

“Bird’s dead. And as I said, these particular horse-fuckers are on our side.”

“I don’t like it.”

“There’s not much to like. We have less than a hundred and fifty men to defend this wall. The wall itself is falling down and the gates rotted away two hundred years ago. We have maybe a day to get ready. We have no reinforcements. No one knows we’re here, and if they did, they couldn’t get to us in time.” Even blind, Valyn could imagine the Flea’s tired shrug. “Given the situation, I’d say having a dozen extra fighters is one of the only things to like.”

“Kettral are one thing,” Belton said warily. “We’re proud to fight with the Kettral, but we’ve been putting blades in these Urghul sons of bitches all year. You ask me, we’d do better chopping off their heads and shitting down their throats while we’ve got the chance.”

“I did not ask you,” the Flea replied quietly. For the first time, his ax had fallen silent. The Urghul were a quarter mile to the east, felling more trees, but they would be back soon. Valyn settled a hand on the cold steel head of one of his own axes.

Belton shifted his feet on the rough ground. Valyn could taste the tension pouring off his men. Back on the Islands, he’d seen brawls break out over less, but this wasn’t going to be a brawl. If it came to swords, people were going to die.

Good, whispered some dark part of him.

With violence came sight.

Men were loosening swords in sheaths. The returning Urghul were muttering angrily in their liquid tongue. They, too, had stopped working, as though they were watching the confrontation unfold. There were only a few heartbeats before it all went straight to shit.

Good.

Valyn gritted his teeth, shook his head. It could be good, but not yet, not until Balendin arrived. He wanted, even more than a wash of mindless violence and the darksight that came with it, to hear the leach scream, to be there when the man who murdered Ha Lin in the depths of Hull’s Hole was finally torn apart.

He set a boot against one of the stones he had balanced at the top of the wall, then shoved. It grated against the stone, then fell, cleaving in half with a sharp crack against the jumbled rubble below. Shouts of alarm erupted from the assembled legionaries. Steel scraped over steel. Valyn pitched his voice above it all.

“Your friends are dead,” he said, pointing north. “They held the line so that you could be here.”

For just a moment, everyone fell silent.

“Of course, you’re dead too,” Valyn went on. He could feel the eyes turn to him. “You’re walking and talking like living soldiers, but you’re corpses, all of you. You’re as dead as the men you left behind yesterday, and the only reason you’re here and standing rather than there, getting trampled into the dirt, is because the Flea brought you here. This wall is just a different place to die.”

“Who in Hull’s name are you?” Belton growled warily.

“Just another dead man. And I’ll tell you this, one corpse to another: the dead don’t get to decide much, but you’ve got one choice left. You can be dead from saving your empire, your republic, whatever the fuck we’re calling it these days, or you can be dead for nothing, for a stupid scrap in the middle of nowhere, fighting people who want the same thing you do. Maybe it doesn’t matter-dead’s dead, after all-but you’ve got a choice to make, probably your last one, so you might as well make it.”

For a long time no one spoke. Then the Flea started laughing, a low, wry chuckle barely louder than the breeze.

“You know,” he said after a moment, “that the speech before the battle is traditionally more upbeat. Less death, more pride and defiance.”

Valyn snorted. “Want me to try again?”

“Nah. You already fucked it up.” Valyn could hear the Wing leader turn back to the legionaries. “So. You want to fight the good Urghul now, or the bad Urghul later?”

Wind carved through the stones. Men shifted, coughed.

“I’m asking,” the Flea went on, “because there’s a lot to do. If I need to kill you, I want to do it now, so I can finish this palisade.”

“All right,” Belton said finally, grudgingly. “We’ll fight beside you. Just keep your pet savages on their chains.”

* * *

Sigrid reached the fort a little before dark. The woman had fought in a battle, then run all day long, but as usual, she smelled of delicate perfume-lavender, this time, and rosewater, and something Valyn couldn’t name. The legionaries stopped working as she approached, staring, waiting for word of the others, the Annurians who had stayed, the friends they had left behind. Sigrid ignored them, found Newt and the Flea up on the hill instead, where the two men were studying the ground and laying charges. Even with the wind, Valyn could hear their conversation easily enough.

“How much time do we have?” the Flea asked.

Sigrid coughed up her own mangled language.

“Better’n I thought,” the Flea replied. “I figured they’d be here tonight. Good work. Anyone else make it?”

Valyn didn’t need to see to know Sigrid was shaking her head.

“No man can escape his fate,” Newt mused.

“Let’s hope that applies to Balendin.”

The Aphorist paused for a moment. “There’s enough explosive here to kill half a dozen oxen, but it’s all about how he sets up. If he’s dead center on the hill, we’ve got him. If not … probably not.”

“I’ll take it,” the Flea replied. “How long will the fuses burn?”

“Half a morning,” the Aphorist replied. “I’ll light ’em when we hear the horses. The flame will be underground. He won’t see anything. Won’t smell anything.”

“Half a morning,” the Flea said grimly, “means we need to hold that wall for half a morning. How much you have left, Sig?” he asked.

Newt translated the leach’s response. “She’ll be flooded in power when the time comes, but she’s been awake two days now, and on the move for all of it. She’ll only be able to pull a little from her well. Any more would drown her.”

“All right,” the Flea said. “Get behind the walls. Get some sleep. Newt-let’s see about rigging some scare charges down in the field, see if we can get the horses to balk.”

Valyn was so intent on the conversation that he didn’t notice the steps approaching along the top of the wall until they were a dozen paces off. He turned, half expecting Huutsuu, but the gait was all wrong, as was the smell-raw nerves rather than Huutsuu’s characteristic resolve. Instead of the warm, rank scent of horse and fur, the person smelled of oiled steel, weariness.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.” One of the Annurian legionaries. “I was ordered to this section of the wall.”

Valyn spread his hands. “All yours.”

He didn’t feel like talking, but he didn’t feel like moving. If the poor bastard wanted to guard the wall, he was welcome to it. For a long time the two of them stood a couple of paces apart, unmoving. Valyn tried listening for the horses that would be thundering down out of the north, but he could hear only the hack of axes and the cursing of soldiers as they worked, the rush of the river off to the west and the intermittent shrieking of the wind.

“You really think they’re dead?” the soldier asked finally. “The men we left up north?”

He offered the questions slowly, quietly, as though afraid to ask them, as though he didn’t really want to hear the answers. Valyn blew out an irritated breath.

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

Valyn pointed over the wall toward Sigrid. “She’s here, which means she’s not there, which means your friends don’t have a leach to shield them anymore. You’ve seen Balendin and the Urghul fight, so you tell me: You think your friends are alive?”

“There’s always a chance. A hope.”

“You’re hoping for the wrong thing. You should be hoping they’re dead, because if they’re not, then Balendin has them, and you know what he does with his prisoners.”

They were cruel words, maybe too cruel, but there wasn’t anything to be gained by dodging the facts. The man sounded young, but half the people wrapped up in the fucking war were young. The legionary had fought the Urghul. He could hear the truth. He could face it.

Valyn wanted to turn away, to forget the man, to take up his silent watch once more, but behind him the soldier’s breathing had gone rough and ragged.

“Those ’Kent-kissing bastards,” the legionary managed. The air smelled of tears and sweat. “I’ll kill them. I’ll murder them.”

Valyn closed his eyes. The young soldier’s grief was thick as early morning mist. Valyn wanted to step clear of it, to find some other place on the wall where there was only the stone and the wind, but there was no other place. The Annurians were preparing, readying weapons, testing out the jagged rocks that Valyn himself had balanced on the ramparts in preparation for the attack. There were people everywhere. There was grief everywhere. You could walk forever and not escape it, could cross rivers, continents, seas, only to find new cities filled with the bereaved, every life shattered in some awful way, every man and woman weeping.

“They kill your friend?” he asked. His own voice sounded rough, callous, half a step from mockery.

The soldier didn’t reply. Sobs rocked him. Nothing unusual there-men cried in battle, before, during, after-and if Valyn was lucky, the crying would be the worst of it. The guy would cough it out and move on. If he was lucky, there wouldn’t be a story to go with the sobs. He wasn’t lucky.

“My brother,” the soldier said finally. “My brother was with them.”

As though that single word-brother-were some kind of kenning, the darkness plastered across Valyn’s eyes shifted, filling with the memory of Kaden. According to the Flea, he was still alive, had made it back to Annur somehow, had even managed to pull the empire out from underneath Adare’s feet. Before Andt-Kyl, the discovery would have filled Valyn with relief, with pride. Now, when he probed his mind for those emotions, he found nothing, just a dark pit where the emotion should have been, lightless, bottomless, cold as winter stone. He could see Kaden’s face, could hear his brother’s voice in his mind, but behind it there was only that emptiness.

“What was your brother’s name?” Valyn asked.

“Oberan,” the soldier replied.

Valyn turned to face the young man. “Well then, you’d better hope that Oberan is dead.”

* * *

The thunder started at dawn, not a thunder of the sky torn apart by lightning, not an intermittent growl punctuated by silence, but a low, constant rumbling: the thunder of hooves so far to the north that Valyn had to strain to make it out, but growing always closer. He rose from the chilly corner of the fort where he had spent the night alone, felt his way along the broken passage, then outside and up onto the wall. Mist was rising off the swamps to the east-thick as smoke, wet and vegetal-but either the sun was obscured by clouds or it was still too low to feel the heat.

The legionaries had spent the night on the walls-their snoring a softer counterpoint to the rumbling in the north-and as he walked among them Valyn thought about sounding the alarm, then discarded the idea. By his own vague reckoning, the Urghul were at least ten miles off. Probably there was something else that could be done to the fort, some final preparation to make, but all the crucial work was finished, and besides, the odds were against any of the sleeping men ever walking away from those walls. The dreams they dreamed as the morning mist shifted over the fort-their nightmares or the bright and fragile worlds to which they had escaped-those dreams would likely be their last.

Valyn stepped carefully over the snoring forms, past them, continuing along the top of the wall until he reached one of the towers, then climbed the crumbling stairs to the top. There was nothing to see, not for him, but the air smelled lighter there, less like dirt and piss and hopelessness.

The Flea found him there just after the sun finally broke through the morning cloud. Valyn recognized the Wing leader’s gait as he climbed the stone stairs to the tower-a little heavier on the right foot, as though some old wound had never fully healed-recognized that solid, steady heartbeat. The man joined him at the crenellations. He stood just a pace away, but remained silent a long time. The eastern forest was alive with birds-nuthatches and chickadees, jays and nightjars-a thousand threads of song. Valyn tried to untangle them, to pick one melody apart from the rest.

“You should go,” the Flea said finally. “There’s nothing you can do here except get in the way.”

Valyn let go of the birdsong. The hooves to the north were drowning it out anyway.

“I won’t get in the way.”

“You’re blind.”

“Only when I’m not fighting. Only when I’m not about to die.”

The Flea fell silent for a while, then handed him a strip of dried meat. “Then eat.”

Valyn shook his head. “I survived in these forests a long time before we came to find you.”

“Good for you. You still need to eat.”

Valyn turned to face the man, measured out the next words, trying to keep his growing rage in check. “You have no idea what I need.”

Anyone else would have recoiled at his tone. The Flea didn’t flinch. There wasn’t even a hint of fear-smell on him. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I do. I watched you grow up, Valyn. I trained you.”

“You trained an idiotic kid who was soft as summer grass. Trust me when I tell you this: I am not him.”

“I know that. It’s a shame.”

For a moment Valyn lost his words. “A shame?” he managed finally. “It’s a shame? That kid was weak. He was slow. He was stupid. I may not have eyes, but back then I was fucking blind. I lost my bird, lost my Wing, sat by while Laith died, and for what? So I could let my sister stab me. So I could fail to kill il Tornja, and fall off a tower.”

His breathing was hot and ragged in his chest, his heart pounding as though he’d just raced five miles, but there was no stopping.

“I’m broken now, busted all to Hull, but I’m not dumb anymore. I’m not soft. If we fought now, you and I, the way we did in Assare, I’d take you apart, I’d cut you to fucking pieces.”

He hadn’t meant to say it, but it was true. Even as he raged, he could feel the part of him that was not quite him, the part that was tainted by the slarn’s strength gathering, coiling to strike. No one, not even the Flea, could stand against that.

“You trained me,” he went on, voice little more than a growl. “It just took me a year too long to learn what you were teaching.”

“No,” the Flea replied. “This is not it.”

“You don’t believe me. That’s fine. Wait until the Urghul get here.”

“I’m not talking about fighting.”

Valyn shook his head. “Then what are you talking about?”

The Flea was silent a long time.

“You know why I joined the Kettral?” he asked finally.

“Don’t shovel me a steaming pile of shit about defending the empire, about Annurian justice.”

“I won’t. I was a kid in Ganaboa. I barely realized I was part of the empire. I joined the Kettral because of Finn.”

Valyn’s stomach lurched inside him. “Blackfeather Finn.”

He could hear the Flea’s nod, the scrape of whiskers over wool. “He was from Ganaboa, too-the son of a ship captain. People forgot about that, that Ganaboa part, because his skin was so light. Anyway, when the Kettral showed up looking for recruits, Finn went. And because I loved him, I went.”

Valyn was mute. The forest birds had gone quiet, as though they, too, heard the distant rumble of the coming horde. Love. It was a word he’d never heard from the Kettral, something the Eyrie worked hard to train out of them long before the Trial.

“I didn’t have the words for it then-we were kids. He was my best friend. I couldn’t imagine staying in Ganaboa without him. Finn was brilliant with that bow of his, even back then. When the Kettral came to the island, came with their contest and their offer of training for the winners, Finn was certain the Eyrie would want him, and he was right.

“I, on the other hand, didn’t know shit, barely knew what end of a knife to hold. Everyone told me I was stupid, that I was going to get the life kicked out of me in the ring while half of Ganaboa laughed, and that would be it.” He paused for a moment at the memory. “They weren’t wrong. Not about the ass-kicking, anyway. Thing was, they didn’t realize how bad I wanted it. I figured if I just kept getting up, if I just kept fighting, the Kettral would have to take me, and if they took me, I could stay with Finn. By the end of that fight I’d broken three ribs, two fingers, and an ankle. I had half of some older kid’s ear in my mouth when they hauled me off. I couldn’t walk for a month afterward, but it got me onto the Islands.

“I thought I was done, then, but you know how it is-I wasn’t close to done. There was the training, the Trial, the early missions, more training. It’s enough to drive a person crazy. I watched it drive men crazy, and women. I watched it break them.”

“But it didn’t break you,” Valyn said, his voice rusted.

“For me it was easy.”

“Easy.” Valyn coughed.

The Flea paused. “Uncomplicated, at least,” he amended. “There was only ever one thing to think about: if I trained hard enough, if I was good enough, I could be with Finn. If the shit hit, I could keep him safe. That’s what I thought about every single morning swimming those ’Kent-kissing laps around the sound. That’s what I thought about all those long days swinging blades in the ring. All the barrel drops. All the quick-grabs and map study and language lessons. This might be the thing, I thought, that keeps him safe. This might be the thing that saves him.”

He fell silent. Along the wall, the legionaries were calling out questions and orders, readying themselves for the attack. The Flea didn’t seem to notice.

“And now?” Valyn asked quietly.

“Now? I’m old. Finn’s gone. But the habits are there. I don’t think I could wake up late if I tried.” The words were soft, but Valyn could hear the grief vibrating in the other man’s voice.

“Why are you telling me this?” Valyn asked.

The Flea waited a few heartbeats before answering. “A couple reasons, I guess. The first is to apologize. It didn’t have to go down like that in Assare, even after Finn died. I lost control, of myself, then my Wing.”

“You didn’t lose control,” Valyn said. “I dropped my blades, and you let me live.”

“I was after the Skullsworn, not you.” The Flea shook his head again. “But I would have gone through you if I had to. I would have killed you all to get at her. It was a mistake. If that night had played out differently, we might have saved a lot of other lives.”

Valyn couldn’t speak. He’d been carrying Assare inside him like a jagged stone for months, the guilt of it weighing him down, its edges shredding anything that it touched. In all that time he’d never once paused to consider another possibility-that maybe the blame wasn’t all his. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but the Flea was already talking again.

“The second reason I’m telling you this, the more important reason, is that you’ve got it wrong. I know how people see me now, even on the Islands. I’m a killer, supposedly the best killer we’ve got. Maybe I am. I’ve opened up plenty of people, some that deserved it, some that probably didn’t. I’d never argue that we are right, not me, not my Wing, not the Eyrie, but I was fighting for something.”

He fell silent.

“And?” Valyn asked. He’d been half holding his breath, he realized. His chest burned as though with a slow fire.

“You, Valyn, you’re just fighting.”