“Shield or no shield,” Huutsuu said, “I have seen many warriors fight. None like you.”
She fell silent. Injured men and women, Annurian and Urghul alike, cried out in their sleep, sharp sobs punched into the cold northern wind. Already, the rot was settling into their wounds. Valyn could smell it. Some would be dead by morning. Against that backdrop of dismemberment and death, it seemed impossible that Valyn himself had walked away from the battle with nothing more than a few scratches. He dragged a finger along a rough scab running the length of his forearm. Huutsuu’s knife had cut deeper nearly every night than the lances and swords of the Urghul army. The Kettral taught their cadets to face death in battle, but in that long, bloody fight in front of the walls of a crumbling fortress, Valyn had felt, for the first time in nearly a year, fully, utterly alive. He shuddered at the memory.
“You can kill this leach,” Huutsuu said to him. “I went into the forests months ago searching for the wrong ghost. This Flea of yours-he is strong, fast, but his way is all waiting and no war.” She put a hand on Valyn’s chest, wrapped his leather jerkin in her fist and pulled him close, so close he could taste the eagerness on her breath. “You can do what he cannot.”
Valyn knocked her hand away. “I’m fucking blind.”
“Not when you fight. You have told me this yourself.”
“I can’t fight all the time.”
He hadn’t expected the words to emerge so heavy with regret. There was something broken, something twisted about wanting to live constantly in the midst of so much blood. Even the Kettral, men and women who lived to fight, to kill, came back to the Islands, they lounged on the beach, went fishing, stayed up half the night swapping tales in shitty taverns over on Hook. I would trade it all, Valyn realized, talking, sleeping, eating, all of it, just to stand in front of that wall burying my axes in the necks of the Urghul. A part of him recognized the desire as mad, suicidal, but what was the point of living if that life was spent plunged in darkness and regret?
“What am I supposed to do?” he demanded. “Blunder through the Urghul camp with my hands stretched out in front of me calling out for Balendin?”
“I want you to learn,” Huutsuu replied.
“Learn what?” Valyn demanded.
“To see.”
As she whispered the last word, he felt the knife bite between his ribs, and again the sight came: Huutsuu leaning close, holding him by the shoulder with one hand, pulling him in even as her steel broke the skin. It was a ritual they’d played out a dozen times already, one ending in the same spasm of blood and sex, but this time Huutsuu made no move to lean close. Instead, she watched him, her blue eyes black, bright, shadow lips drawn back. He could feel her hot breath on his cheek, but unlike all those other nights, this time she smelled of determination rather than desire.
“You can see,” she said.
As the knife’s pressure eased, the vision faded.
Valyn shook his head grimly. “No, I can’t.”
Huutsuu pulled away. “You can.”
“Only when I have to,” Valyn said. “Only when I’m about to die.”
Huutsuu turned her back on him, boots crunching over rough stone as she crossed the top of the small tower. When she reached the far side she paused, as though studying the wall below. She was still facing away from him when she spoke again.
“You are always about to die.”
Then, with the sound of a distant wind picking up through the trees, she spun and threw. As her arm moved through the top of the arc, the world’s form resolved from the darkness-Huutsuu’s torso twisting with the throw, her fingers letting the knife fly free, the knife itself tumbling over and over, etching its own black path on the greater blackness. Just as it had on the battlefield below, Valyn could feel his body reacting before his mind, some part of him older and faster than thought making a dozen small adjustments, pivoting, throwing his hand up, closing his own fingers around the handle of the knife, snatching it clear of the air and then flicking it back at Huutsuu.
If she hadn’t known it was coming, she would have died. Instead, even as she threw, she was expecting his impossible catch and diving aside. Even so, she was almost too slow. The knife clattered into the stone where she had stood a quarter heartbeat earlier. They both fell still. Valyn’s darksight passed as quickly as the violence, leaving him with the sound of his own quickened breathing rasping in his ears.
“You think I won’t kill you,” he said quietly. “You think because we’ve fucked a dozen times and neither one of us has died that it won’t happen.” He shook his head. “You’re wrong. One of these times, it will take over completely.…”
“It?” Huutsuu asked. He could hear her getting to her feet.
“This thing inside me. The thing that can see. That can kill.”
“No, Malkeenian,” she said. “It is not a thing inside you. It is you.”
Valyn shook his head. “I’m not this fast. Not even close. Look…” He yanked one of the twin axes free of his belt, just to show her. It would have been a passable draw back on the Islands, but after the strange, impossible competence that came over him with the darksight, the motion felt clumsy, almost interminably slow.
Huutsuu shook her head, but made no move to approach. “A horse will not run at a fire,” she said, “not when it is young. But fire-it is as much a part of war as blood. The creatures must be trained, and so we blind them, not with a blade, but with thick wool. I have done this many times. Blinded, the horse will ride toward a fire, will ride straight through a fire if you ask it to.”
“I’m not one of your horses, Huutsuu.”
“No. You are faster and more dangerous, but for you, as for them, there is a time for blindness, and a time to take the blindfold off.”
“I don’t know how,” he snarled.
“You do. I have watched you all these days. Even when you say you cannot see, you see. You turn toward motion and light. When a branch looms before you, you dip your head.”
“Do you have any idea how many branches I hit riding around that ’Kent-kissing forest?” Valyn demanded.
Huutsuu’s laugh was sharp enough to cut. “Do you have any idea how many branches you missed?” She shook her head. “You are a fool, Malkeenian. You say you can only see when death looms close, but death is always close. Now, for instance…”
She lunged at him, her body resolving from the darkness. As she closed, she drew her sword, swinging it overhead in a vicious arc. Valyn stepped aside at the last moment, saw the dark sparks flash as it crashed against the stone. He kicked her in the back of the knee, and she fell, rolled away, came up in a crouch, the sword level before her, pointed at his chest.
“Can you see me?” she asked quietly.
“We’ve been over this,” he growled. “When the fight is finished-”
“What if it is never finished, Malkeenian?”
He stared at her. She smiled.
“This is what Kwihna teaches.…”
“Kwihna’s ‘teachings,’” he spat, “are nothing more than blood.”
“Your blindness is not a blindness of the eyes,” Huutsuu replied. “It is a blindness of the soul. You think that you can draw a line in the dirt, that you can say, ‘To this side of the line is fighting, to this side quiet. On this side war, and on this side, peace. On this side I can see, but here I am blind.’”
As Valyn stared, she hurled herself at him again. He let the blade go by his face, caught her wrist, and pulled her close.
“It is all struggle, Malkeenian,” she whispered. “Life is suffering-that is what Kwihna teaches.”