The Last Mortal Bond (14 page)

It was pointless. The mob, on the edge of murder only moments before, had crumbled, forgetting Adare entirely. All they wanted was escape. Panicked men and women stumbled into her horse, clutched at her legs, scrabbled at her bridle or saddle, tried to lift themselves clear of the violence. One man seized her by the knee, cursing as someone behind him, a boy not much older than ten, tried to shove him aside. Clinging desperately to her saddle's cantle, Adare thrashed with her trapped leg, flinging the man free, then kicking him in the face with her boot. He screamed, nose smashed, then went down beneath the feet of his fellows. Not dead, but doomed.

People dove into the small streets off the Godsway, cowered in doorways and storefronts, scrambled onto the plinths of the statues to get above the mad, killing press, and all the time the soldiers drove on, sun flashing off arms and polished armor, weapons rising and falling in the day's late light, over and over and over.

Finally, one soldier, smaller than the others, but closest to Adare, raised his cudgel, pointing at her.

“Here!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “The Malkeenian! We have her!”

It was hardly necessary to shout. It was over, Adare realized, just like that. The Godsway, ablaze with noise only moments before, had gone horribly, utterly quiet. The soldiers were closing in, but Adare barely noticed them. She stared, instead, at the dead.

Dozens of crumpled bodies littered the ground. Some moved, groaning or sobbing with the effort. Most lay still. Here was a dead boy with his arm twisted awfully awry, like a bird's broken wing. There was a broken woman, her shattered ribs thrusting white and obscene through flesh and cloth alike. Blood pooled everywhere on the wide flagstones.

The short soldier kicked his horse forward through a knot of corpses, men and women who had died holding on to each other, then reined in next to Adare. She thought briefly of running, but there was nowhere to run. Instead, she turned to face the man.

When he pulled off his helm, she saw that he was panting, sweating. Something had opened a gash just at the edge of his scalp, but he paid it no mind. His eyes, bright with the setting sun, were fixed on her.

“Were you so eager to see me dead,” Adare demanded, surprised that her voice did not shake, “that you cut a path through your own people?”

The soldier hesitated, cudgel sagging in his grip. He glanced down at the bodies, then back at Adare.

“See you dead?”

“Or captured,” she replied cooly. “Clapped in irons.”

The man was shaking his head, slowly at first, then more vigorously, bowing in his saddle even as he protested. “No, Your Radiance. You misunderstand. The council sent us.”

“I
know
the council sent you,” Adare said, a sick horror sloshing in her gut. It was the only explanation.

“As soon as they heard, they sent us, scrambled up as quick as they could. You took a horrible risk, Your Radiance, arriving in the city unannounced. The moment they heard, they sent us.”

Adare stared at him.

I am a fool,
Adare thought bleakly, the truth a lash across the face. She was covered in blood, her face hot with it, sticky. She scrubbed a hand over her brow. It came away soaked.

“How badly are you harmed, Your Radiance?” the man asked. He was worried now, on the edge of fear.

Adare studied the blood, bright against her darker palm. She watched it a moment, then looked down at the flagstones, at the bodies strewn there, dozens of them, crushed to death, eyes bulging, limbs twisted in the awful poses of their panic.

I am a fool, and people have died for my folly
.

They'd been ready to kill her, of course. Probably would have, if the soldiers hadn't arrived. It didn't matter. They were her people. Annurians. Men and women that she had sworn both privately and publicly to protect, and they were dead because she had thought, idiotically, that she could return in triumph to the city of her birth. She had thought she risked only her own life.

So very, very stupid
.

“You're safe now, Your Radiance,” the soldier was saying. He had slung the cudgel from his belt, was bowing low in his saddle once more. The others had arranged themselves in a cordon around her, ten men deep. What foe they expected to hold back, Adare had no idea. “You're safe with us,” the soldier said again.

Adare shook her head, staring at one corpse splayed out on the ground. It was the woman, the one person in the crowd to whom she had spoken, brown eyes fixed blankly on the sky.

“Safe,” Adare said. She wanted to cry, to puke, to scream, but it would not do for the Emperor of Annur to cry or scream. “Safe
,
” she said again, more quietly this time, that single syllable rancid on her tongue.

 

8

Gwenna stood in the bow of the
Widow's Wish,
squinting toward the horizon. Though it was clear overhead, storm and the coming of night had bruised the eastern sky a livid purple darker than the sea itself. She couldn't make out any land above the low, shifting swells, but the seabirds perched in the rigging meant they were close.

“We'll take the smallboat from here,” Gwenna said, turning to the ship's captain.

Quen Rouan raised his bushy brows. “I wouldn't recommend it.”

“I wasn't asking for your recommendation.”

Gwenna had nothing against Rouan. Twelve days on the ship, and he'd treated her Wing with respect, even deference. He'd handled his vessel well through the squall that kicked up east of the Broken Bay, kept his men firmly in line, and didn't ask questions. Gwenna had watched him, one calm afternoon, dive into the water with a rope around his waist to retrieve an albatross feather floating on the waves.
For my daughter,
he'd said after the men had hauled him back aboard.
She's never seen one.
Rouan was a good sailor. A good captain. Maybe even a good man. Which was all the more reason to try to keep him from getting killed.

“I don't know how much you were told about this particular run…,” Gwenna began.

Rouan held up a hand to forestall her. “I go where I'm told. That's it. This time I was told to deliver you to the Qirins, and the Qirins are still at least thirty or forty miles east, depending on how much time we made up today. I'll know as soon as the sun drops and the stars come out. Whatever the distance, it's too much to cover in a smallboat.”

Gwenna snorted. “Gent and I rowed a dory a hundred miles once, and that was before I turned thirteen. The distance is the whole point, Captain. Ships that get too close to those islands haven't been coming back.”

“I understand there is risk,” Rouan replied, stiffening, glancing east as though he expected to see topsails cresting the waves.

“Well, there doesn't have to be. Not for you. Get the boat in the water, and we'll be out of your hair.”

Rouan hesitated. Gwenna could read the pride in that hesitation, the reluctance to leave an honest job unfinished, the unwillingness to run from an unseen threat. He was brave, but he wasn't trained for this.

She made her voice hard. “I'm not asking, Captain.”

He met her eyes a moment, then nodded brusquely, turning to bark orders at the half-dozen men on the deck. It was a good crew, and before the sun had slipped much farther down the western sky, the boat was bobbing in place, small hull bumping up against the larger vessel like a duckling against her mother. Two barrels of gear—food, mostly, and water, and extra weapons—had been packed a week earlier, and it took no time at all for Talal to secure them beneath the thwarts of the boat.

“You'll want the sail,” Rouan said. “At least partway.”

Gwenna shook her head. “No, we won't.”

She started to turn, but the captain brought her up short with a hand on her arm. Gwenna went for her knife, had the 'Kent-kissing thing half drawn before her mind could calm the reflexes of her flesh. Rouan looked at the steel, pursed his lips, and withdrew his hand.

“The world's all upside down,” he said quietly. “I'll grant you that. But not everyone's trying to kill you.”

Gwenna forced herself to shrug. “That hasn't been my experience.”

He watched her for a long time.

“How old are you?” he asked finally.

Gwenna met the gaze. “Does it matter?”

The man shook his head slowly. “I suppose it doesn't.” He turned east, toward where the Islands lay over the horizon. “What do you think you'll find?”

“After two weeks, you want to start asking questions now?” Gwenna asked. “Questions get people killed, same as blades.”

He didn't shy away. “I just want to know what the chances are.”

“Depends on whose chances you're talking about.”

“Ours,” he said gravely.

“Yours and mine?”

“Annur's.”

Gwenna started to make a crack, then stopped herself. It was an honest question and it deserved a real answer. She glanced down into the boat. Talal and Annick were already aboard, the leach at one of the oars, the sniper in the bow, her shortbow held loosely in one hand. Daylight was fading fast, and the low sun lit the chop to the east, making the small wave crests look like scratches on the dark surface of the sea. Somewhere beyond that darkness, the Islands waited, an upthrust atoll barely large enough to support human settlement, and then, beyond that, the open plain of the indifferent ocean. She looked back at Rouan.

“Our chances suck.”

He shook his head. “You don't sound worried.”

“Me?” Gwenna asked. “I'm always worried.”

“A hard way to live,” Rouan murmured.

Gwenna glanced over at him, this man who collected feathers for his distant daughter, who feared his world might be collapsing around him. She clapped him roughly on the shoulder. “I didn't know there was an easy way.”

*   *   *

Annick noted the incoming kettral in the same voice Gwenna might have used to discuss the blister that the oar was raising on the flat of her palm. In fact, Annick sounded considerably less concerned about the bird than Gwenna was about the blister, despite the fact that one was a minor inconvenience and the other had probably come to kill them all.

Still holding the oar, Gwenna twisted in her seat, searching for movement against the dark cloud piled up in the east.

“There,” Talal said, pointing upward, higher than she'd been looking. “Looks like a patrol. Call it five miles out.”

“Well, shit,” Gwenna said.

She looked back to the west. They weren't far from the
Widow's Wish
—maybe a mile or so—and the sun had only dipped fully beneath the horizon in the last few hundred strokes. She could still make out the dark lines of the ship's masts, the sail full of the evening's breeze and the last red light of the lost sun. In the growing darkness, the billowing canvas might have been ablaze.

“Shit,” Gwenna said again.

It was good luck for her Wing, actually. The ship was impossible to miss. Whoever was flying the bird would almost certainly be focused on it, hopefully so focused that they missed Gwenna's own boat with its sails down, nosing forward silently through the waves. The conversation with Rouan came back to her suddenly; her flippant remark,
It all depends on whose chances you're talking about
.

“Barrels out,” she said, eyes still on the ship. Rouan had swung west just after dropping them, aiming his bow away from the Islands. It didn't matter. No ship could outrun a bird in flight. “Bodies over. Talal, is there enough steel about to scuttle this bitch?”

“They haven't made us yet,” he observed quietly. “And forty miles is a long swim.”

“Good thing we like swimming,” Gwenna snapped. “Can you scuttle the boat, or should I start prodding at the caulking with my knife?”

Talal met her eyes, then nodded. A moment later, a section of planking ripped free with a groan. The boat jerked as though they'd struck a reef, but there was no reef here. Gwenna had anticipated the motion, had demanded it, in fact, and she still felt a twist in her gut as water started pouring into the breach. They'd trained for this very event hundreds of times, but there was still something unsettling about seeing your boat slip beneath the waves in the middle of the open ocean, beneath the roiling arc of the blackening sky.

Gwenna flipped both oars out of the oarlocks, tossed them free of the sinking boat, rolled over the gunwale, kicked her way clear, then turned. Treading water, she watched the small boat vanish beneath the waves. For a few heartbeats she imagined it sinking, settling down through the water, washing back and forth like a leaf, nosed at by curious fish as it drifted deeper and deeper into the gloom. She waited for it to hit bottom, but it just kept sinking through her mind's dark depths.

“Incoming,” Annick said.

Gwenna pulled her eyes from the spot where the boat had disappeared and looked up.

The bird was much closer—almost directly overhead. It looked as though she'd dropped a little bit of elevation—
Scanning the waves,
Gwenna thought grimly—but it was hard enough to see a swimmer's head above the waves in daylight, let alone after sunset. She let herself sink deep in the water, just her nose and eyes above the low chop, and watched, half holding her breath, as the bird cut across the clouds, so silent it might have been no more than the shape of the night wind.

“Whoever it is,” Talal observed quietly, “they're headed for the
Wish
.”

“Might just be taking a look,” Annick said.

Gwenna stared at the sniper. “You really think that?”

Annick shook her head. “No.”

They watched in silence as the ship heeled over, fleeing helplessly west toward the setting sun. Gwenna was breathing hard, and not with the effort of treading water.