Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(209)

When the most paralyzing horror had passed, she turned her eyes back to the page.

I do not intend to die without a fight, Adare. Perhaps I shall win, though I find it unlikely. The foe we face is both sly and strong, thwarting me at each pass. I will bring my sword to these meetings, but you are my last blade. You, and Kaden, and Valyn. If you feel, any of you, that you have been hammered hard, it has been that you might better hold an edge.

Heed what I write here, Adare. Heed it, though it may implicate someone you have known a long time, someone you trust. You cannot bargain with this foe, cannot reason with him, cannot find an accommodation. Whoever it is, you must stop at nothing to bring him down. I have dispatched people to warn and protect Kaden and Valyn, but you alone are privy to this final letter.

The final lines were not a declaration of love or an expression of sorrow in the face of imminent death. Neither would have been Sanlitun’s way. His last words to her were hard and practical:

Resist faith. Resist trust. Believe only in what you touch with your hands. The rest is error and air.

Adare raised her eyes from the page. Blood pounded in her ears, burned beneath her skin. Her own breath sounded ragged in her chest. She folded the paper neatly along the creases and tucked it back into the book, flipping a few pages to conceal it. Ran sat at his desk still, grumbling over whatever work lay before him. She could still feel his seed warm against her thigh.

The man shifted in his chair, then turned.

She forced a smile onto her face.

“Bored of that book already?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Looking for something a little more … engaging?” He winked.

She wanted to scream, to run, to pull the blankets over her head, to bury herself in the bed, in the very earth. She wanted to flee the room, to race back to her chambers in the Crane where the Aedolians stood guard over her door. All at once, she felt like a girl again, lost, and frightened, and confused. But she was not a girl. She was a princess, a minister, and maybe the last living Malkeenian.

I am a blade, she told herself.

The man before her had murdered her father, manipulated her, and escaped justice. She forced herself to meet his eye and let the blanket slip from her shoulders, revealing her naked breasts.

“Only if you think you can handle it,” she replied.





50





Kaden sat cross-legged on a jagged escarpment above the Aedolian camp, ignoring the bite of the wind and the exhausted ache of his feet and shoulders, following the two kettral with his eyes as they quartered the sky. At this distance, it was difficult to judge their scale—they might have been ravens or hawks wheeling on the thermals, the kind of birds he had spent countless hours observing from the ledges above Ashk’lan. In fact, if he didn’t glance back over his shoulder at the piled corpses of the traitorous guardsmen, if he kept his mind from the bloody edges of his memory, he might have been back at the monastery, seated on one of the jagged ledges, waiting for Pater or Akiil to jar him from his thoughts and drag him back for the evening meal. It was a pleasant delusion, and he lingered in it awhile, luxuriating in the lie, until a flash of sun on steel caught his eye: the birds were returning, and as they drew closer, as he made out the small figures perched on the talons, it became impossible to believe that they were normal birds of prey.

Valyn had taken his own kettral—Suant’ra, Kaden reminded himself—and that of the defeated Wing to search for Balendin and Adiv, neither of whose bodies had been found. The birds had been in the air the better part of the day, circling farther and farther from the camp, until Kaden was certain their quarry had eluded them. It should have been impossible; both men were wounded, at least slightly, without food or water, and on foot in treacherous country. But, as the Shin would say: There is no should; there is only what is. The two traitors had already proved themselves as unpredictable as they were dangerous, and who was Kaden to say that they didn’t have further powers at their disposal, powers as yet unrevealed? Neither the leach nor the councillor had frightened Kaden while he was inside the vaniate, but now that he had let the trance lapse, the thought that they were out there somewhere, wandering the mountains, filled him with unease.

He watched as the two birds approached the ridge, considered the black-clad figures as they leapt from the talons, dropping a dozen feet or so to the rubble and coming up unharmed. They were young, this Wing of Valyn’s, younger than the Kettral Kaden remembered from his childhood—or was that only a trick of memory? Despite their age, the four soldiers under Valyn’s command moved with a confidence and economy that could only come from long years of training, checking weapons and gear unconsciously, touching hands to hilts, scanning the surrounding terrain, running through a hundred habits built up over the years. Even the youngest of the lot, the Wing’s sniper, seemed steadier, deadlier, than some of the Aedolians around whom Kaden had grown up. And then there was Valyn.