“What?” the flier shot back. “Like the other day?”
“You weren’t supposed to be on the bridge, you idiot.”
“None of this is helping,” Talal said quietly. He sat on his own bunk, lacing up his boots.
“Helping what?” Laith demanded. “It’s certainly helping to ruin my sleep.”
“Good,” Valyn interjected, before the argument could go any further. “We’ve got a lot to work through today, and not much time to do it.” Technically, this was information for the briefing, but they hadn’t been doing anything else by the book. Why start now? he thought to himself.
“What?” Annick asked. She had set aside her bow and was looking over the fletching of her arrows. She didn’t bother to look up at Valyn when he turned.
“Barrel drops,” he replied.
“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna groaned. “Again?”
“Well, well,” Laith said, rising for the first time, picking his teeth absently with a finger. “I might go an entire day without a bruise after all.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gwenna said. “It’s not so easy when you’re the one dropping instead of the one flying.”
“The other Wings quit doing barrel drops a week ago,” Annick pointed out flatly.
“Well,” Valyn responded with more heat than he had intended, “we haven’t.”
“Who’s in charge of the training?” Talal asked quietly.
“Not Fane,” Laith groaned from the bunk. “Not Fane again.”
“The Flea will be overseeing today’s training,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice level.
Silence reigned in the room as the soldiers eyed one another warily.
“Well,” Gwenna snorted finally, dropping out of her bunk and fixing Valyn with those green eyes of hers. “Today, my illustrious lord commander, would be a good day to start getting things right.”
* * *
At least it’s sunny, Valyn thought to himself, closing his eyes and leaning back into his leather harness. Wind tugged at his hair and clothes, threatening to rip him from his perch on Suant’ra’s talons while the back draft from the great bird’s slow, powerful wing beats buffeted him from above.
After eight years on the Islands, Valyn still marveled at the power and grace of the kettral. Without the kettral, there would be no Kettral. The creatures could cover ground faster than any horse, faster than a three-hundred-oar galley, soar over impregnable walls as though they were thin lines drawn on the dirt, land on towers, and outdistance any pursuit in a matter of minutes. If necessary, the bird herself could even fight, tearing through flesh and armor with her claws and beak as if they were cloth.
In taverns all across Vash and Eridroa, men told tales of the birds, whispering that they fed on human flesh. Most people had never seen one, of course—there were only a few score in the entire world, and the empire guarded them closely—but a good look at Suant’ra wouldn’t have done much to calm anyone’s nerves. She was clearly a predator, with all the attributes of her tinier cousins writ large: the hooked razor beak and raking talons; the long, packed pinions of jet and white that allowed her to ride the thermals or swoop at speeds that would drive a rider’s eyes into the back of her head. She was a bird of prey, all right, and a predator with a seventy-foot wingspan is a fearsome thing.
Flying around enjoying the breeze was all well and good, but it wasn’t much use unless you could get on and off of the bird’s talons quickly. The Kettral often landed in heavily patrolled areas, and a few extra seconds fiddling with straps and buckles could mean the difference between life and death. Barrel drops trained the Wing to disembark over water. It sounded easy enough: fly in low, unbuckle the safety straps, unhitch the barrel filled with weapons and gear (for which the exercise was named), and dive into the water. In practice, however, a barrel drop ranged somewhere between terrifying and deadly.
For one thing, a kettral could fly far faster than a galloping horse. When you hit the waves at that speed, they felt more like brick than water. For another, there were four bodies in play, along with a dozen or so straps and buckles; a collision with any of them could easily bruise a rib or slash a cheek. And then, of course, there was the barrel itself. Some situations didn’t require extra gear, and the Wing could drop in with only the weapons and clothes on their backs. Plenty of more complicated missions, however, called for disguises, extra munitions (that had to be kept dry), even food if the team needed to stay in the field for more than a few days. All of that went into the barrel, which could weigh upward of fifty pounds and hit the waves like a boulder plummeting down a steep hillside. Soldiers had been killed in barrel drops before, and Valyn was starting to think that someone on his Wing was going to be next.