The Providence of Fire (5 page)

It took Valyn a moment to find his bearings in the shifting conversation, but when he did, he shook his head curtly.

“The Unhewn Throne is yours,” he said firmly, “as it was our father's. You can't surrender it because of a handful of murders.”

“Hundreds,” Kaden replied, voice harder than Valyn expected. “The Aedolians killed hundreds, not a handful. And the throne? If I'm so desperate to sit on top of a chunk of rock, there are plenty.” He gestured into the night. “I could stay right here. The view is better and no one else would be killed.”

Valyn glanced over his blade, ran a finger along the edge, feeling for the nick.

“Are you sure about that?”

Kaden laughed helplessly. “Of course I'm not sure, Valyn. Let me list for you the things I know for sure: the print of a brindled bear, the color of bruiseberries, the weight of a bucket of water…”

“All right,” Valyn said. “I get it. We're not sure about anything.”

Kaden stared at him, the fire in his irises so bright it had to hurt. “I know this: the Aedolians came for me. The monks died because of me.”

“That's the truth,” Valyn replied, “but it's not the end of the truth.”

“You sound like a monk.”

“The killing is aimed at you right now, but it won't
stop
with you. Let me tell you something
I
know: men are animals. Look anywhere you want: Anthera or the Blood Cities, the jungle tribes of the Waist, look at the fucking
Urghul,
for 'Shael's sake. People kill to get power, they kill to keep power, and they kill if they think they might lose it, which is pretty much always. Even if you and I both stay out of it, even if we both
die,
whoever came after us will
keep coming
. They'll find the next threat, the next worrisome voice, the next person with the wrong name or the wrong skin. Maybe they'll go after the rich for their coin or the peasants for their rice, the Bascans because they're too dark or the Breatans because they're too pale—it doesn't matter. People who will murder monks will murder anyone. I
trained
with bastards like this. They won't back off because you give up. They'll come on harder. Do you
get
that?”

Valyn fell silent, the words drying up as suddenly as they had come. He was panting, he realized. Blood slammed in his temples and his fingers had curled into fists so tight they hurt. Kaden was watching him, watching him the way you might watch a wild animal, wary and uncertain of its intent.

“We'll find him,” Kaden said finally.

“Find who?”

“The Kettral leach. Balendin. The one who killed your friend. We'll find him, and we'll kill him.”

Valyn stared. “This isn't about me,” he protested. “That's my point.”

“I know,” Kaden replied. Somehow, the uncertainty had sloughed off of him. There was a distance in those burning eyes again, as though Valyn was seeing them from miles away. “I know it isn't.”

They sat awhile, listening to a rockfall farther down the ridgeline. It sounded like a series of explosions, like Kettral munitions, only louder, boulders the size of houses loosened by winter ice losing their hold, shattering to pieces on the rocky slopes below.

“So,” Valyn said warily, “no more bullshit about sitting the fight out on a piece of rock in the middle of the mountains.”

Kaden shook his head.

“Good. Now what's the plan?”

Valyn had heard it once already, the outlines at least, but he hoped to Hull that a day and a night had been enough for Kaden to change his mind. That hope shattered after a glance at his brother.

“The way I told you,” Kaden replied. “We split up. Tan and I go to the Ishien—”

“The Ishien,” Valyn said, shaking his head. “A group of monastics even more secretive and strange than your Shin monks. A cadre of fanatics that you've never even met.”

“They know about the Csestriim,” Kaden replied. “They hunt the Csestriim. It's what they do, why their order was founded. All those old stories about centuries of war, about humans fighting for their lives against armies of immortal, unfeeling warriors—most people think it's all just myth. Not the Ishien. For them, the war never ended. They are still fighting. If I'm going to survive, if we are going to
win,
I need to know what they know.”

Valyn bore down on the stone, scraping it over the steel more roughly than he'd intended. He and his Wing had risked everything to come after Kaden, had thrown away their place on the Islands and their years of training both. Already they had been betrayed, captured, and almost killed, and there was a very real chance that by the time the whole thing had played out, more than one of them would be dead. That part was fine. They all understood the risks, had all accepted years earlier that they might die defending the Emperor and empire. To let Kaden wander off, however, to be
ordered
to stand aside while he threw himself into danger, was both stupid and insulting. The whole thing set Valyn's teeth on edge.

“Your monk friend doesn't seem to think too highly of the plan, and he's the one who spent some time with these bastards, right?”

Kaden blew out a long breath. “Rampuri Tan was one of the Ishien before he came to the Shin. For years.”

“And then he
left,
” Valyn pointed out, letting the last word hang in the air a moment. “Doesn't speak too highly of this private war of theirs.”

“It's not a private war,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore. Not if the Csestriim killed our father.”

“All right,” Valyn said. “I take the point. So let's fly there together. My Wing can watch your back while you learn what you need to learn, then we all go to Annur together.”

Kaden hesitated, then shook his head. “I don't know how long I'll be with the Ishien, and I need you back in Annur as soon as possible. We don't know the first thing about what's going on in the capital.”

“We know that that priest, Uinian, is locked up for Father's murder,” Valyn replied.

“But what does that
mean
?”

Valyn found himself chuckling bleakly. “Well, either Uinian did it or he didn't. Maybe he's Csestriim, and maybe he's not. If he is involved, either he acted alone, or he didn't. My guess is that he had some sort of help—that would explain his ability to turn Tarik Adiv and Micijah Ut, to suborn at least a Wing of Kettral, but then again, maybe they all had a sudden upwelling of religious sentiment.” He shook his head. “It's tough to see the situation clearly from atop this rock.”

“That's why I need you in Annur,” Kaden said. “So that when I return, I'll have some idea what I'm up against. Time is crucial here.”

Valyn watched his brother. The first stars blazed in the eastern sky, but Kaden's eyes burned brighter, the only true light in the great dark of the mountains. There was something in the way he sat, in the way he moved or didn't move, something Valyn could apprehend only dimly.…

“That's not the only reason,” Valyn said finally. “You want us in Annur, but that's not all. There's something else.”

Kaden shook his head ruefully. “I'm supposed to be the one who's good at noticing things.”

“What is it?” Valyn pressed.

Kaden hesitated, then shrugged. “There are gates,” he said finally. “
Kenta
. I should be able to use them. It's why I was sent here in the first place, but I need to test them. I need to know.”

“Gates?”

“A network of them, made by the Csestriim thousands of years ago and scattered across both continents.” He hesitated. “Maybe
beyond
both continents for all I know. You step through one
kenta
and emerge from a different one hundreds of miles distant. Thousands of miles. They were a Csestriim weapon, and now they are entrusted to us, to the Malkeenians, to keep and to guard.”

Valyn stared for a moment. “Slow down,” he said finally, trying to make sense of the claim, to comprehend the full scope of the implications. Ancient Csestriim gates, portals spanning continents—it sounded like insanity, but then, pretty much everything since leaving the Islands had seemed insane. “Go back and tell it from the start.”

Kaden remained silent a moment, gathering his thoughts, and then, as Valyn listened in disbelief, explained it all: the Blank God and the Csestriim leaches, the war against the humans and the founding of the empire, the
vaniate
—some strange trance that the Shin had somehow learned from the Csestriim, that Kaden himself had learned from the Shin—and the annihilation that threatened anyone who attempted to use the gates without achieving it. According to Kaden, Annur itself hinged on the network of
kenta,
hinged on the ability of the emperors to use them. The concept made tactical and strategic sense. The Kettral enjoyed a crushing advantage over their foes because the birds allowed them to move faster, to know more, to turn up suddenly where no one expected them to be. The gates, if they were real, would prove even more powerful.
If
they were real. If they actually worked.

“Have you seen one?” Valyn asked. “Have you seen anyone use one?”

Kaden shook his head. “But there's a
kenta
near here in the mountains, one that leads to the Ishien. I asked Tan about it earlier.”

Valyn spread his hands. “Even if it's real, even if it does what the monk claims, it could kill you.”

“Obliterate is more like it, but yes.”

Valyn slid his sword back into its sheath, tucked the small stone into a pouch at his belt. The wind was cold, sharp, the stars like shards of ice scattered across the clear night.

“I can't let you do it,” he said quietly.

Kaden nodded, as though he had expected the answer. “You can't stop me.”

“Yes, I can. The whole thing is worse than foolish, and I know something about foolish.” He ticked off the problems on his fingers. “Your monk is, at best, a mystery; these gates have the power to destroy entire armies; and the Ishien, given what little we know about them, sound like obsessive maniacs. It is a
bad decision,
Kaden.”

“Sometimes there are no good decisions. If I'm going to thwart the Csestriim and rule Annur, I need the Ishien, and I need the gates.”

“You can wait.”

“While our foes consolidate their power?” Kaden turned to watch him. Valyn could hear his brother's breathing, could smell the dried blood on his skin, the damp wool of his robe, and beneath it, something else, something hard and unbending. “I appreciate you trying to keep me safe,” he said quietly, laying a hand on Valyn's shoulder, “but you can't, not unless we live here in the mountains forever. Whatever path I take, there is risk. It comes with ruling. What I need from you most is not safety, but support. Tan doubts me. Pyrre challenges me. Your Wing thinks I'm an untrained, guileless recluse. I need
you
to back me.”

They locked eyes. The plan was madness, but Kaden didn't sound mad. He sounded ready.

Valyn blew out a long, frustrated breath. “What happened to sitting on this rock while the Csestriim rule Annur?”

Kaden smiled. “You convinced me not to.”

*   *   *

“The plan,” Kaden said, facing down the group with more poise than Valyn would have expected, “is that Tan and I are going to the nearest
kenta
—he says there is one in the mountains northeast of here. We will all fly there, Tan and I will use the gate to reach the Ishien, and the rest of you will fly on to Annur. Once you're in the city, you can contact my sister, Adare, and learn what she knows. Tan and I will meet you in the capital, at the Shin chapterhouse.”

“In my experience,” Pyrre drawled, “plans tend to be a little heavier on the ‘hows' and the ‘if, thens.'”

“Why don't we
all
just take this fucking
kenta
thing?” Gwenna demanded. Valyn's Wing had greeted Kaden's explanation of the gates first with amusement, then skepticism, then wariness, and though Valyn himself understood the response, shared it, in fact, he had promised Kaden his support.

“Gwenna…” he began.

“No, really!” she said, rounding on him. “If these things are real, we could save a whole lot of Hull's sweet time using them. They eat less than birds and I can't imagine they shit at all.…”

“The
kenta
would destroy you,” Tan said, cutting through her words.

Pyrre raised an eyebrow. “How frightening. They sound like fascinating artifacts, but this is all beside the point. My contract stipulates I keep Kaden safe. Playing nursemaid for his brother might be entertaining, but it's not what I crossed half of Vash to accomplish.”

Valyn ignored the jibe. “The Emperor has decided,” he said. “It is ours to obey.”

The words were true enough, but they did little to allay his misgivings.
Orders,
he reminded himself.
You're following orders.

Orders hadn't been too much trouble for him back on the Islands—he had been a cadet then, and the men and women telling him what to do had earned their scars dozens of times over. Kaden, on the other hand, might be the rightful Emperor, but he was no soldier; he had none of the training, none of the instincts. Letting him get involved with the reconnaissance of Ashk'lan at an immediate, tactical level had been a mistake. Valyn's mistake. Not only had Kaden interfered with a crucial decision, he had put himself in harm's way to do so. And Adiv was alive. Valyn forced down the thought along with his mounting anger.

Kaden
was
the Emperor, and Valyn hadn't flown two thousand miles just to undermine his brother's nascent authority.

“I have told you before,” Tan said, shaking his head slowly, “the Ishien are not like the Shin.”