Van nodded. “Most of my force will be concentrated there, Your Radiance.”
Most. It was the gentlest defiance, like a warm feather pillow held over a face in the dead of night.
“The Dawn Palace has its own complement of guards,” Adare said. “I could not allow the city itself to go undefended only to strengthen my own fortress.”
“We will secure the city, Your Radiance. You may be assured of it. We are speaking only of five hundred men here in the palace, five hundred men pulled from an army of thousands.”
Dread’s cold, dark well opened inside Adare. They were dancing around the issue, testing, probing, and yet, there should have been no need to dance. She was the Emperor, seated in her throne room atop her throne. The fact the conversation had gone on so long already was almost treason.
“Five hundred men could well turn the tide.” She took a deep breath, straightened her spine. “Put them on the outer wall.”
For several heartbeats, the general just watched her, his eyes unreadable beneath that weathered brow.
“It is with great regret, Your Radiance, that I must decline. I have my orders.…”
You are not declining, Adare wanted to scream at him. An invitation to dinner is something one declines. One can decline an offer to spend the hot months at a summer estate. It is not declining when you refuse the clearly stated order of your emperor. It is a ’Shael-spawned rebellion.
She wanted to hurl the words in the bastard’s face, felt them aching inside her. Instead, she kept her mouth clamped shut.
History was filled with accounts of military coups. The greatest threat to any head of state was rarely another state. War was slow, expensive, exhausting work, a matter of endless logistics and marching, disease and lines of supply. Most emperors and kings were actually toppled from inside, by their own armies, by the very soldiers on whose strength they had relied.
Adare knew this well enough-it was a truism of history-but she had always imagined something different when she thought of a military coup: the army battering down its own walls, blood in the streets and gutters, crowns ripped from heads and those heads impaled, openmouthed, on pikes. It seemed only natural that the military overthrow of a nation should be loud, violent, obvious to all; the opposite, in fact, of what was unfolding before her eyes, on the flagstones of her own throne room.
Suddenly, Adare felt the weight of every sword inside the chamber, every spearhead, every piece of armor. The soldiers had not moved-they might have been carved from stone-but they didn’t need to move. Everyone knew what they could do, what they were for. Against those silent ranks of men, her slippered ministers seemed soft and insubstantial; not men, but the ghosts of men.
“Of course,” Van went on, “our only purpose is to serve, Your Radiance.”
He kept his eyes on her as she slowly, agonizingly inclined her chin. There was nothing else to do. Any protest would only underscore her own impotence.
“You have my thanks,” she managed, the words like tar on her tongue.
It was a good lesson, if she somehow survived to remember it: silence had its own violence; some reigns ended in blades and fire; some with the barest nod of a head.
52
No matter the training, no matter the book study and drills in the field, no matter the tactics and strategy, the missions completed, the years survived-sometimes you just had bad fucking luck.
True to his word, the Flea had waited until the last possible moment to pull his people off the wall. All morning, the Kettral stood shoulder to shoulder with those few Annurian soldiers who remained, beating back one more wave of riders, then another, then another. Only when it was obviously hopeless, when the Urghul were as thick atop Mierten’s wall as the defenders themselves, did the Wing leader give the signal to retreat. The remaining legionaries-sweating, bleeding, locked in their own desperate struggles-didn’t even notice.
They’ll never know, Valyn realized as he turned for one last glance. The lines of battle had dissolved into madness. Fent was fighting with a broken sword, while Sander, who had no weapon at all, was punching his attackers, clawing at them, hugging them close enough to bite into their throats. Farther down the wall, Huutsuu and her Urghul were also losing ground, and though Valyn had fought beside her for the first part of the morning, she, too, was lost in her own struggle, oblivious to his betrayal. They’ll never know we left them to their deaths.
He realized, as he backed away, that he’d been hoping someone would notice. He’d been waiting to see the fury in the eyes of those he was abandoning, readying himself for their rage. He’d been preparing to bear away, as long as he survived, their final curses. And then there were no curses to bear. No judgment. The ease of the whole thing made him sick. The Urghul swarmed over the wall, but that didn’t matter, not to him, not anymore. The river was only a few hundred paces away. Even if he didn’t run, even if he stopped to offer up a prayer before diving in, he was going to make it.
Then the bad luck hit.
There was no way to know, passing beneath the fort’s southern gate, that the stonework had been weakened by the days of battle to the north. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe the weakness had nothing to do with the war. Maybe it was just a matter of rain and snow, hundreds of years of ice and wind gnawing at the mortar, eroding it a little at a time, chewing between the huge stone blocks until anything, even the softest footstep, could bring them down. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the way the stone shifted beneath Newt’s feet, how the wall caved and the huge lintel came down upon his leg.
Anyone slower would have been killed. The stone was twice as high as Valyn and had to weigh two dozen times as much. Only the Aphorist’s quick reflexes-he’d twisted his torso clear at the last moment-had saved his head. Not that it mattered. The leg was crushed below the knee, pinning him in place, and the Urghul were coming. Valyn couldn’t see the northern wall beyond the fort’s central structures, but he could hear what was happening there clearly enough-the sounds of fighting had drained away, replaced by the vicious ululation of victory.
By the time Valyn reached Newt, his face was twisted with pain, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Shockingly, the man had refused to cry out, forcing the agony down inside him somewhere deep, silent, somewhere it wouldn’t betray his Wingmates. Sigrid reached them a moment later, shoved Valyn roughly aside, then knelt next to the demolitions master. She made a quiet sound-half whistle, half croon-as she rested an open hand on his sweating brow. Valyn had never seen such a tender gesture from the leach.
Newt hacked out something that might have been a moan or a laugh.
“I understand the irony…,” he whispered.
The Flea had been lagging behind, covering their retreat. When he rounded the corner, however, he took the scene in at a glance and, barely breaking stride, threw his shoulder against the massive stone. For a moment, Valyn thought the man might actually move it.
The Islands had been filled with scenes of determination, hard men and women harnessing their will to perform nearly impossible tasks. Anyone who passed Hull’s Trial had to be able to fight through exhaustion and despair, had to be able to keep moving, keep trying, long after the body was finished and the mind close to unraveling. Valyn had been there when Trea Bel dragged herself from the waves after seven days swimming laps around the Islands, smiling even as she collapsed because she knew she’d won her bet. He’d been there when Daveen Shaleel demonstrated to a whole class of cadets that a soldier could perform field surgery on herself, talking quietly between gritted teeth all while she stitched shut a shark bite that had taken out a portion of her thigh. It was easy, after a life spent training on the Islands, to think you had seen it all, but Valyn had never seen anything quite like the Flea as he threw his weight against that stone.