Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(210)

After gesturing to Laith to tie up the bird, Valyn looked around the camp, spotted Kaden on the ledge, and turned up the slope toward him. He was not the boy Kaden remembered from their childhood duels in the Dawn Palace. He had grown up and out, filling his broad shoulders in a way that Kaden never would, wearing the blades on his back as though they were a part of him, keeping his jaw clenched tight most of the time, and fingering the scars on his hands and arms as though they were good luck. It was the eyes, however, that had changed most of all. Unlike Kaden, Sanlitun, or Adare, Valyn had always had dark eyes, but nothing like this. These were holes into some perfect darkness, wells from which no light escaped. It wasn’t the scars or the swords that made Valyn seem dangerous; it was the depth of those eyes.

His boots crunched over the scree, and when he reached Kaden, he paused, gazed out at the peaks beyond, then grimaced.

“I’ve got no idea where those bastards went. There should have been something, some kind of track.…” He trailed off. A nasty gash on his lower lip had opened up, and he spat blood over the edge of the cliff. The wind whipped it out and away, flinging it into the gulf.

“Sit down,” Kaden said, gesturing to the rock. “You’ve been flying all day.”

“For all the ’Kent-kissing good it did us,” Valyn replied. Still, after a moment, he lowered himself to the ledge with a groan.

“I feel like someone’s been beating me with the blunt edge of a board for the past week,” he said, twisting his head, stretching the muscles of his neck. He balled his hands into fists, cracked the knuckles, then frowned at the palms as though he’d never seen them before. “Every part of my body hurts.”

Kaden smiled wearily. “I thought you Kettral lived for this sort of thing. Martial valor, godlike endurance, the daily cheating of Ananshael—”

“Nah,” Valyn replied, plucking at his torn, sweat-stained blacks. “I mostly got into it for the clothes.”

“You should have been a monk. It’s hard to beat a wool robe.”

Valyn chuckled, and the two stared out over the mountains and valleys, side by side, companions in the simplicity of silence. Kaden would have remained there all day if he could, all year, enjoying the low rush of water, the sound of the wind knifing between the passes, the sun warm on his cool skin. He knew these things, understood them in a way he had ceased to understand his own brother, ceased to understand himself.

“So,” Valyn said after a long while, “what do I call you now?”

Kaden kept his eyes on the far mountains as he revolved the question. During the long flight from the monastery, he hadn’t had a chance to grieve for his father or consider his new station in life. After eight years with the Shin, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to grieve anymore. The fact that he was Emperor of Annur, sole sovereign over two continents, leader of millions, felt like just that, a fact; the truth had not penetrated to any organ that could actually feel it. A part of him wanted to make a joke, to laugh it off with a wry remark, but the impulse felt wrong, somehow, unfair to the monks who had died, to Valyn’s Wing, who had flown all this way to rescue him, to his father, who also had spent long years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains and now lay cold in his tomb.

“I suppose it’s ‘Your Radiance’ now,” Valyn continued, shaking his head. “That’s the protocol, right?”

Kaden stared at the blazing orb of the lowering sun. He wondered if his eyes looked like that.

“It is,” he replied finally. Then he turned to Valyn. “But when we’re not around others … When there’s just the two of us … I mean someone’s got to use my name, right?”

Valyn shrugged. “It’s up to you. Your Radiance.”

Kaden closed his eyes against the honorific, then forced himself to open them once more. “What happened with the other Wing leader?” he asked. “With Yurl?”

He’d seen the body—a carcass, really—gutted, the hands hacked away, eyes bulging with an expression that could only have been terror. It was a savage killing, purposeless in its violence.

Valyn grimaced, met his eyes, looked away, and for a moment Kaden caught a glimpse of the child he had known a decade earlier—uncertain but unwilling to show it, trying to put a bold face on his confusion.

“There was a girl, Ha Lin…,” he began, then trailed off, fingering a nasty scab on the back of his hand, ripping it free in a wash of blood without even glancing down. When he looked back at Kaden, his eyes were hooded again, unreadable. He looked like a soldier. More than a soldier, Kaden thought, a killer.