“’Shael take it,” he muttered, severing the thick canvas with a single swipe of the blade and tumbling headlong toward the brutal waves below. “At least if it kills me, I won’t have to do it again.”
* * *
“Well, that was a goat fuck,” the Flea said quietly.
Valyn nodded stiffly, the motion sending a spike of pain down his neck and into his arm. He had flown six more drops with his Wing, hanging on desperately despite the damage to his shoulder, and each had gone more poorly than the last. He tried to tell Laith to slow down, to take a shallower angle, but the flier didn’t seem to understand the words slower or careful. For eight years, he’d been flying belly in the dirt, right at the limit, and two weeks of training failures hadn’t done much to alter his old, reckless habits. On the final run-through, Valyn, Gwenna, Annick, and Talal had been scattered across so much water that it had been quicker to simply swim it in rather than waiting for Laith to pick them up.
The Flea had watched the whole morning’s fiasco from a low headland overlooking the bay. When Valyn finally hauled himself out of the water, then made the short climb to the top of the cliff, soaked to the bone and bleeding from half a dozen scratches and abrasions, the older soldier didn’t say a word at first, just looked at him with those flat, measuring eyes. This, Valyn thought to himself, is not going to be good.
The Flea didn’t have problems with his own Wing. His Wing was a legend: Blackfeather Finn, the finest tournament archer in the world; Chi Hoai Mi, the fearless flier who carried with her a small silver cup from which she drank the blood of her slain foes; Newt the Aphorist and Sigrid sa’Karyna, the demolitions master as ugly as the leach was beautiful, the two of them the only people ever to escape from the Spire and the cruel priests of Meshkent; and, of course, the Flea himself.
When Valyn first arrived on the Islands, eight years old with eyes wide as saucers, he had asked the short, broad, slightly hunched soldier why people called him “the Flea.” The older man had cracked a crooked smile. “Because I’m small, black, and annoying,” he had responded to Valyn’s surprise and discomfort. It wasn’t until a week or so later that Valyn learned the real story.
The empire’s eastern frontier, the part that didn’t disappear into the Urghul steppe, butted up against the Blood Cities—dozens of independent city-states dotting southeastern Vash. Normally those cities spent their time warring against and betraying one another, and as a result, posed little threat to Annur. That changed when Casimir Damek rose to power.
Damek was a brilliant general, a master politician, and a leach who claimed to be a god. The Annurians ridiculed the notion, but after a series of improbable victories, the citizens of the Blood Cities believed, and for the first time in several centuries, the empire found itself facing a unified army led by a man whose powers, admittedly, seemed godly—generals struck down by arrows shot from a mile distant, geysers of earth routing cavalry, entire rivers diverted to drown his foes as they thrashed in their armor. In a single season, he destroyed the eastern imperial army and marched on the Bend with fifty thousand troops.
The Kettral were called in.
The Kettral, shockingly, failed.
Damek captured three Wings in quick succession, captured, castrated, mutilated, and decapitated them. It was the worst string of defeats in the history of the Eyrie. In his camp east of the Bend, the general boasted that he gave no more thought to the Kettral than he did to the fleas on his great gray mastiffs.
Four days later, he was dead.
On the Qirins, mission assignments were confidential. No one asked questions and no one made boasts. Within days, however, Anjin Serrata, a quiet, capable Wing commander who was known for nothing more than keeping his head down and his eyes up, acquired a new nickname: the Flea.
And that was just the beginning of the legend, Valyn reminded himself as he prepared for the tongue-lashing.
The Flea, however, didn’t say a word. He waited silently until the whole Wing assembled before dismissing them with a curt wave of his hand. Valyn hesitated, uncertain, then turned with the rest. The man’s voice brought him up short.
“Not you.”
So, Valyn realized. Here it comes. At least the commander wasn’t going to ream him out in front of his own people.
“A solid and thorough goat fuck,” the Flea said again once the others had left.
“Yes, sir,” Valyn responded wearily. “It was a mess.”
“What went wrong?” the man asked. He sounded curious rather than angry.
“What didn’t go wrong?” Valyn exploded. He shook his head. “We couldn’t get the ’Kent-kissing straps to release quickly enough, for one thing. And the angle of attack was all wrong—we kept slamming into each other, and the barrel almost took off Talal’s head two drops in a row. As it is, he’s going to need to get stitched up at the infirmary. You can see a little chunk of his skull when you pull the skin out of the way.” He grimaced. “It’s Laith’s flying,” he concluded reluctantly. “That’s the root of all the problems.”