Pyrre shrugged. “We’re not spoiled for choice. Normally, I’d recommend spending your last coins on a favorite meal or a good whore, but I don’t think you monks tend to carry much coin, and you seem to be lacking in whores. Mostly lacking, anyway.” She smiled at Triste with this last comment.
“I’m not a whore,” the girl snapped.
The assassin raised her hands in surrendur. “Me, I’m exhausted. There’s just time to enjoy a good sound sleep.”
Kaden stared as Pyrre Lakatur rolled onto her back, locked her fingers behind her head, and closed her eyes.
“That’s it?” he asked, amazed. “You cross an entire continent to save me, and then just give up?”
“Everyone thinks that Rassambur is all about learning to knife people in the belly and poison their soup,” the assassin responded without opening her eyes. “What you really learn there is a pretty basic lesson: Death is inevitable. The god comes for us all.”
“What about back at Ashk’lan? When you fought Ut? You didn’t seem so resigned then!”
“Then, there was a chance. Now…” Pyrre shrugged. “I’ve been running for a day and a night. We all have. The traitors behind us have five times our numbers as well as a Kettral Wing, not to mention, if your sour master here is to be believed, the evil pet creature of an ancient and immortal race that could track you across moving water by moonlight. Tomorrow, we’ll fight, and I will give some of them to the god, but we will not win. And so, for now, I will enjoy a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.”
Kaden turned his attention to his umial. “I assume you’re not content to lie down and die, too?”
The older monk shook his head. “No, but the way is not clear. I must think.”
And then, as if they were back on the ledges of Ashk’lan, Rampuri Tan shifted into a cross-legged position and gazed out across the valley toward the west, chest rising and falling so slowly, the movement was almost imperceptible. The monk’s eyes remained open, but the sharp focus had left them, as though he were dreaming. Or dead, Kaden reflected grimly.
He considered Tan for a while longer, then took the long lens from where it lay beside Pyrre, training it on the enemy soldiers once more. “There’s got to be something,” he muttered, studying the Kettral as they exchanged handshakes with the Aedolians. The leader was a blond youth, tall and well-built, dressed all in blacks like the rest of his Wing. The short Kettral swords crisscrossed his back. Valyn and I used to play with wooden swords like that. They had pretended to be great warriors, but when the men came for them on the morrow, when Pyrre “gave a few to the god,” Kaden doubted he would manage to land a single blow. Bitterness welled up inside him, hot and sour. He allowed the emotion its flood, then shunted it aside. Bitterness would do him no more good than regret.
Look at the men, he told himself. Find a solution.
The newcomer commanded a standard five-man Wing, only … Kaden peered through the long lens once more. One of them—the flier, it looked like—was a woman, middling height with short blond hair. The only other Kettral he could get a good view of was a lanky soldier with feathers in his long hair and ink running up his arms. It was a strange look for a warrior, but after everything Kaden had seen in the past week, he was numb to strangeness.
As the two talked vigorously with Ut and Adiv, Kaden lowered the glass. Night already smudged the sky. Maybe the assassin was right. Maybe it was time to accept the inevitable. Beshra’an, saama’an, kinla’an, even the vaniate—they all seemed frivolous and inconsequential pursuits in the face of all that steel.
“What’s that?” Triste asked, pointing at something in the distance.
Kaden squinted. A dark shape was moving across the gathering gloom high above the mountain peaks. He raised the lens to his eye once more, and a second bird burst into view, winging in hard and fast.
“’Shael take it,” he swore.
“Take care,” Pyrre murmured without opening her eyes. “That’s my god you’re invoking.” The woman rooted awkwardly beneath her back, tossed aside a sharp rock, then settled once more.
“They’ve got a second bird,” Kaden said. “You want to see?”
“Not particularly.”
“We don’t know who these new ones are.”
“We don’t know who any of them are except for Adiv, who’s a bastard, and Ut, who’s a much bigger bastard with a very large sword. Their names don’t matter. What matters is that they want to kill you and they are setting up to make a very thorough job of it.”