The Emperor's Blades(12)

Valyn tossed back the hatch and dropped below before she could finish the sentence.

The ship’s hold was low and dim. A few bars of sunlight lanced through the unchinked cracks in the decking above, but most of the space lay in deep, thick shadow. In a fight like this, there usually wasn’t much to see belowdecks, and only a few of the other cadets had already been down there. Still, it paid to look places other people didn’t.

Valyn waited for his eyes to adjust, then moved ahead, picking his way cautiously around stray barrels and bales as the vessel rocked gently beneath him, waves lapping at the hull. Whoever hit the ship had made off with most of the cargo, if there had been any cargo to begin with. According to the ink seals, the barrels that remained carried wine from Sia, although most of that trade tended to follow the shorter, overland route to the capital. A few crates were still lashed against the bulkhead, and Valyn pried one open with his belt knife: bales of cotton, also from Sia. It was good cargo, but not something professionals would usually go after. He was just starting to crack open the next crate when what sounded like a quiet moan caught his ear.

Without thinking, he drew one of the two standard short blades strapped across his back.

The sound was coming from the bow of the ship, all the way up by the foremost scuppers. Fane’s Wing should have checked the vessel over already, should have made sure that everyone was either dead or tied up before Valyn and the rest of the cadets came anywhere close. Fane, however, was one of the Eyrie’s more impulsive trainers, more interested in swinging a blade than skulking around belowdecks, checking pulses. He would have given the hold a glance, to be sure—but at a glance, a gravely wounded man could easily pass for dead.

Briefly Valyn considered calling someone else. If there were a sailor still alive, Fane would want to know immediately. On the other hand, he wasn’t certain just what he’d heard, and he didn’t relish the idea of hollering for the whole group only to find some untended livestock milling around in the bow. After a quick glance over his shoulder, Valyn glided silently ahead, belt knife held down by his waist, short blade in a tight guard before him—standard position for close-quarters fighting.

The man was tucked all the way forward against the curve of the keel itself, slumped in a puddle of his own blood. For a moment Valyn thought he was dead, that the sound had been the groaning of hawser against capstan, or the protestation of wood warping beneath the sun. Then the sailor opened his eyes.

They shone in the meager light, baffled and tormented by pain.

Valyn took half a step forward, then stopped. Assume nothing. That was the entire first chapter of Hendran’s Tactics, a tome that virtually every Kettral had committed to memory. The man looked near death, but Valyn held back.

“Can you hear me?” he asked quietly. “How badly are you wounded?”

The sailor’s eyes rolled in his head as though searching for the source of the sound before coming to rest, finally, on Valyn.

“You…,” he groaned, the word gravelly and weak.

Valyn stared. He had never seen the man before, certainly not in his years on the Islands, but recognition filled that feverish gaze and pinned him to the spot.

“You’re delirious,” he said carefully, edging closer. Unless the man was a professional masker, he wasn’t faking. “Where are you wounded?”

“You have the eyes,” the sailor responded weakly.

Valyn froze. Usually when people referred to “the eyes,” they were talking about his father, Sanlitun, or his brother, Kaden, both of whom had been blessed with the famous burning gaze, flaming irises that marked them as the heirs to Intarra herself, as the rightful Emperors of Annur. Even his older sister, Adare, had that gaze—although as a woman, she would never sit the Unhewn Throne. Growing up, Valyn had been fiercely jealous of those eyes, had, in fact, almost blinded himself once with a burning twig while trying to light his own eyes ablaze. The truth was, though, that Valyn’s stare was no less unsettling: black pupils set in irises brown as char. Kaden’s eyes might be fire, Ha Lin said, but Valyn’s were the remains after the fire had guttered out.

“We came … for you,” the sailor insisted.

Valyn felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and the ship seemed to roll more treacherously with the swells.

“Why?” he asked. “Who is ‘we’?”

“Aedolians,” the man managed. “The Emperor sent us.”

The Aedolian Guard. That explained both the professionalism and the Liran steel. The personal bodyguards of the Emperor were both well trained and well supplied; aside from the Kettral, they were the most fabled troops in the empire, iron-willed men whose loyalty to the Annurian throne was the stuff of legend. The founder of their order, Jarl Genner, had decreed that they take no wives, father no children, and own no property, all to ensure their unstinting allegiance to the Emperor and to the Guard.