The Last Mortal Bond (20 page)

She shook her head. “I
wish
that we knew where Valyn was. I'd trade half of Raalte for a loyal Kettral Wing.” She sharpened her gaze, fixed it on Kaden. “My spies told me that
you
might know where he is. That the two of you had some contact after he fled the Islands.”

“Spies?” Kaden asked, raising his brows.

“Yes,” Adare replied. “Spies. Men and women who pretended to be siding with you, but were really siding with me. Surely even your inept wreckage of a republic has spies.”

He nodded slowly. “What did they tell you, exactly?”

“That Valyn fled the Islands in disgrace. That he came to you. Maybe that he rescued you. Is it true?”

Kaden nodded again. “True enough. And our spies tell me that there was a Kettral Wing at the battle of Andt-Kyl. They say that a woman with red hair took charge before the arrival of the Army of the North. There were explosions. Kettral-style demolitions. People saw a girl in Kettral blacks who looked almost like a boy.” He watched her watching him. “The descriptions sound like soldiers on Valyn's Wing. Gwenna Sharpe. Annick Frencha.”

Adare nodded. “I saw them from the tower,” she said, cleaving as close as possible to the truth. “No one knew who they were.”

“Not even il Tornja? He is the
kenarang
. The Kettral fall under his command.”

“That doesn't mean he memorized the face of every cadet. And, in case your spies didn't mention it, there was a battle that day. Il Tornja was trying to stop Long Fist, not play Guess the Kettral.”

“But there was no sign of Valyn? Up there in the north?”

Adare shook her head. “If he was there, I didn't see him. Of course, there was a battle going on, tens of thousands of soldiers.…”

Kaden hesitated, as though considering whether or not to press the issue, then frowned. It was the only real expression she'd seen from him since he joined her on the dock.

“What about Long Fist?” he asked finally. “Was the Urghul chieftain at the battle?”

It was a new line of conversation; dangerous, but not as dangerous as the discussion of Valyn.

“No,” Adare replied. “A Kettral deserter named Balendin commanded the Urghul. A leach, evidently. He held up the bridges.”

“I know Balendin,” Kaden said quietly. “I almost killed him in the Bone Mountains. He is dangerous.”

Adare clamped down on her surprise. She had heard no account linking the leach to Kaden, but there was a lot she hadn't heard in the madness of the months following her father's death. She tried to imagine Kaden killing anyone, let alone a Kettral-trained leach. He wasn't a warrior—that much was obvious at a glance—but those eyes … She shivered, then looked away, watching the ships swinging at anchor. Gulls gathered in the rigging. Every so often, one would scream, drop into a dive, then pull a fish, wet and writhing, from the waves.

“Dangerous doesn't begin to describe the leach,” Adare replied after a pause. “He had his prisoners dragged out into the open, then torn limb from limb. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he helped.”

Kaden just nodded. “It is his well. He leaches off their terror of him, their hatred and revulsion, uses it to do … what he does.”

“I'll tell you what he does,” Adare said, the memory fresh and horrible even after so many months. “He raises up whole bridges for his army to cross. He smashes down walls.” She shook her head. “He can squeeze his fingers from a hundred paces off, and a man's head will explode inside his helmet.”

“It will only get worse,” Kaden replied. “As more people come to fear him, his power will grow.”

“Which is why il Tornja and I have been trying to
stop
the bastard. You're down here playing mapmaker with those fucking idiots on the council, but everything is happening in the
north,
Kaden.”

“Everything?” he asked quietly. “I know about Balendin, but was Long Fist there?”

Adare hesitated, running her mind over the truth's twisting fabric. It was all woven together: il Tornja's identity and Valyn's death, the truth about Long Fist and the truth about Nira and Oshi. Once you gave up one of those truths, it was hard to stop. One thread led to another, and pretty soon you could find you'd ripped apart the whole fabric, find it scattered in tatters around you.

“Adare,” Kaden said, eyes fixed on her. “I need to know what was going on up there. Horrible things could happen if we fail to act.”

“Horrible things have
already
happened. To me. To you. To Annur.” She waved a hand vaguely northward. “They are still fucking
happening,
Kaden. You haven't been to the north. You haven't see the flayed corpses left by the Urghul. The charred bodies of the children. The women taken apart slowly, limb by limb. Have you even been outside the 'Kent-kissing capital since you returned?”

He shook his head slowly. “The work is here.…”

“The work is everywhere. Bandits choke off half our roads. Fishermen have discovered they can make more coin as petty pirates. Trade is down. Theft is up. You've lost half of Hanno and Channary to the Waist tribes, if anything I've heard is true. The Manjari are poking their noses over the Ancaz. Freeport and the Federated Cities are murdering us on tariffs. The whole thing is coming apart at the seams.

“You think I'm reckless because I rode into Annur alone, unannounced, and burned down your idiotic hall?” She stabbed a finger at him. “What about you? You and your republic have been cautious, you've been measured, you debate for eight or nine days about whether or not to fly more flags from the walls of the Dawn Palace, and you are getting
killed
for it.”

She paused, breathing heavily, then corrected herself. “No.
You
aren't getting killed. Other people, other Annurians, people who don't have red walls to hide behind—
they're
the ones getting killed for the decisions you make. Or fail to make.”

If he was taken aback by the tirade, it didn't show. He gazed at her steadily, then nodded. “I understand your urgency. It will not save lives, however, to hurl ourselves heedlessly in one direction or another.”

Adare was already shaking her head. “This is like something our father would have said. He thought everything through—thought it through far better than
you
have—tried to figure all the angles, had a 'Kent-kissing
plan,
and what did he get for it? A blade between the ribs.” She bit down hard, partly to keep from saying anything else, partly to choke back her grief.

Kaden just sat there, hands folded in his lap, studying her as though she were a blue-fin striper dumped out on the dock to flop herself to death. The mention of Sanlitun's murder brought no expression to his face.

“It was your general who killed him,” he said finally, quietly. “Ran il Tornja killed our father.”

“You think I don't fucking
know
that?”

He blinked. “It's hard to know what to think.”

“Yes, Kaden. It
is
hard. But that doesn't mean you can just
quit doing it
.”

“I haven't quit.”

“Is that right?” Adare demanded. “What is it you've been doing then, these past nine months? You destroyed an empire that brought peace and prosperity for hundreds of years—I'll grant you that—and then what?”

Someone else, anyone else, would have responded to the challenge. Nira would have slapped her. Lehav would have argued with her. Ran il Tornja would have laughed at her, and Ran il Tornja was one of the 'Kent-kissing Csestriim. Kaden just shook his head.

“The situation is more difficult than you understand.”

“And what makes you think,” she demanded, bringing her voice under control, “that you have any idea what I understand?”

“There are other threats than the Urghul. More dire threats.”

“Of course there are,” she spat. “I just got done listing half of them. There are so many threats that the Urghul sometimes actually seem quaint. At least they're just a bloodthirsty horde with a fairly predictable plan to smash through the Army of the North and put the entire empire to the sword. It's really a somewhat old-fashioned notion, if you think about it.”

“The Urghul may be a simple, bloodthirsty horde,” Kaden replied, “but the man commanding them is not. And your general, Ran il Tornja—he is not simply a general.”

A cold prickling ran up Adare's spine. She started to respond, then stopped. Just like that, they had returned to the dangerous ground of half-truths and qualified revelations. Kaden met her eyes. There was no eagerness there, no uncertainty. She couldn't see anything at all in those blazing irises. She had expected this, had planned for it, but she had not realized it would come so abruptly.

She glanced over her shoulder. The Aedolians were a hundred paces off, standing with their backs turned at the end of the dock. She lowered her voice anyway. “Ran il Tornja is Csestriim,” she said.

Kaden nodded. “I know. Which means the child you bore him is also Csestriim, at least in part.”

He delivered the words quietly, almost indifferently, as though he were a servant murmuring a message of little consequence. It took all Adare's restraint not to hit him.

“I did not bear
him
a child,” she hissed, voice a blade honed against her rage. “Having a son was not something I did
for
il Tornja. Sanlitun is not some trinket, some prize that I produced from between my legs to please the great general. My child is my own.”

Kaden didn't even blink in the face of her fury. “And yet your son links il Tornja more closely to the throne.”

“Il Tornja doesn't
want
the fucking throne.”

“Not as an end in itself, perhaps, but as a means, a tool. He is Csestriim, Adare.”

Slowly, painfully, she shackled her pounding heart, choked back the words flooding up into her throat, forced herself to be still. Waves rustled beneath the dock like something alive and tireless. She watched her brother, trying to gauge her next play from the shifting fire in his eyes. After a moment, she decided to throw the dice. “As is the one you call Kiel.”

“He is.”

For a while they just sat, as though the truths they had both just uttered were too large to move past. The waves were growing colder as the sun sagged behind the palace, and Adare pulled her feet from the water, hugging her knees to her chest. An east wind had picked up, tossing her hair in her face. She shivered.

“Il Tornja warned me that Kiel would be here,” she said finally. “He told me not to trust him.”

“And Kiel told me not to trust il Tornja.”

Adare spread her hands. “Sounds like an impasse.”

“Not necessarily,” Kaden replied slowly. “Beyond the opinions of the two Csestriim, there are the raw facts to consider.”

“Facts,” Adare replied warily, “have a way of twisting with the teller.”

“We know this much, at least: the general you rely on so heavily is the same one who murdered our father, who sent close to a hundred Aedolians to kill me, who ordered a Kettral Wing to kill Valyn before he even left the Islands.” Kaden shook his head. “If we're trying to decide who to trust, it seems to me we might want to look at what they've been up to, at what they have done to
earn
that trust.”

Adare marshaled her thoughts. She'd known all this, of course, but it was different to hear it from someone else, to hear the bloody words spoken aloud.

“There were reasons.”

Kaden didn't move. “There are always reasons.”

Far out in the bay, a ship tacked against the wind, heeling over to cut across the waves, first one way, then the next, approaching its invisible goal so obliquely that even after watching it for a while, Adare couldn't say for sure where it was going. After a long time she turned back to her brother.

She needed to tell him something—that much was clear. He already knew about il Tornja, knew that
she
knew her own general was a murderer. If she revealed nothing else, none of her reasons for everything she'd done, he would go on believing all the things he so obviously believed: that she had seized the throne out of some dumb lust for power, that she'd made common cause with il Tornja purely to consolidate that power, that she cared about her own station instead of the welfare of Annur. If he believed all that, there would be no working with him, and she needed to work with him, with the entire council, if they were to have any hope of saving anyone. She needed to tell him something, to explain. The question was: how much?

“When I took the Unhewn Throne,” she said finally, quietly, “I thought you were dead.”

“I don't care about the throne, Adare.”

“If I'd known you were still alive, that you were going to return to the city, I wouldn't have made that move. I wouldn't have
had
to, but it had been months since Father's funeral, months with no word, and if I didn't take the throne, il Tornja
would
have.”

“I don't care about the throne,” he said again.

She studied him, tried to see past those eyes to something human, something true.

“Then why did you destroy Annur? If you don't care about the throne, why work so hard to keep me from sitting on it?”

“It wasn't to stop you. It was to stop il Tornja. Annur is his … his weapon, and I could not let him bring it to bear.”

“Did it occur to you,” she demanded, “that I might have already taken il Tornja in hand?”

“Taken him in hand?” Kaden raised his brows. “You slept with him, and then, with his support, you declared yourself Emperor. Not only did you fail to take him in hand, you confirmed him in his post, and then you joined your own military force to his. If you've been anything but compliant, I haven't seen any evidence of it. The fact that you know he is Csestriim, that you know he murdered our father … that just makes it worse.”