It’s what was supposed to happen to all of us, he realized.
When they fled the Islands, every member of his Wing had been raw, green, and unready. Battle and blood had changed them, changed Valyn himself most of all, but where Gwenna and Talal and Annick had grown into proper Kettral, disciplined, driven, allied in their shared mission, and bound, too, by a deeper, human bond, Valyn had become a solitary creature, a thing of the shadows, hungry for blood, violence, annihilation.
He glanced over his shoulder to where Gwenna was helping tend to the birds. She was arguing with Annick about something while the two of them rolled a huge barrel of feed away from the wall, then started prying off the top. The other Kettral had gathered around, trading barbs as they worked. Valyn hesitated, waited for the Flea to enter the infirmary before turning to stare at the scene. For a long time, he stood alone in the shadows, just watching, listening. It was nothing special, just a bunch of weary soldiers going about their work, but he felt, standing there in the starlight, as though he were gazing across an unbridgeable gulf into a different life, one he should have lived, could have lived, if only he had not made so many mistakes.
For a moment there, he almost stepped back into the square, almost walked back across the open space to join them. There was always work for another pair of hands, always another job to do. He could throw his shoulder behind a barrel or check over a bird’s jesses. Learn the names of the new folks. Trade stories of the past year with Talal …
He shook his head. His own stories were all darkness and death. Now that he could see again, he saw the way people looked at him: warily, one hand always on a weapon when he came near. The Kettral were just a few dozen paces away. All that separated him from them were wide-open flagstones, empty air. Men and women had walked across that square every day for decades, centuries, going about the bright, boring business of their lives-buying bread, running errands, hauling water-things a child could do. For Valyn, though, there was no way across.
Talal glanced up, found him watching, but Valyn looked away, shifting his eyes from the square to the tower looming above. The Emperor’s command post. Where Adare came every day to oversee her city’s preparations. He’d said he would wait until the war was over, but then, he’d said a lot of things.
* * *
The Emperor’s guard was heavier than Valyn had expected. They were in Annur, after all, in her own city, safe behind the walls, the Urghul still at least a day away. He’d expected a couple pairs of Aedolians, maybe six men total. Instead, a dozen soldiers armored in the steel and bronze of the Sons of Flame flanked her as she made her way down the street, riding, as Gwenna said she did each day, from the Dawn Palace to her tower on the wall.
Kill them, whispered a voice inside his head.
He could do it-twelve men, taken by surprise, their only training whatever drills their priestly commanders had cobbled together over the years-he could take them apart one limb at a time, leave the bodies scattered across the road. He started to lift an ax from his belt, then shook his head, settling it back in place. Though a part of him hungered to wade into the block of guardsmen, there was a chance Adare might escape in the chaos. Or worse, that she might die. Valyn had every intention of killing her, of course, but he needed to talk to her first, to learn what she’d done with Kaden, whether his brother was still alive, rotting in a cell somewhere, or already dead. Besides, now that he was back with the Kettral, there was another way, a more elegant way. He shifted his hand from the ax to the munitions he’d lifted from Gwenna’s stores: one smoker, one flash bang-more than enough to kindle the necessary madness.
The whole thing took less than twenty heartbeats. He lit both charges at the same time, tossed them into the midst of the horses, waited a moment for the choking clouds of smoke to fill the narrow street, took a deep breath of clean air, then stepped into the swirling haze. All over again, he was blind. Even his preternatural sight was no good in the smoke, but that didn’t matter. He’d learned, in his long year of darkness, to listen, to frame the world around him from the sounds it made. There, to his left, a pawing horse. To his right, the scrape of steel against leather. He ducked under one man’s blind, stumbling attack, stepped past a panicking horse, and then he was there at the heart of the entourage. He could smell his sister, her soap and her choked-back fear. He could hear her lean heart pounding.
He gained the saddle with a single leap, landed behind her, yanked the black bag down over her head, then kneed the horse forward, out of the blind melee. Adare twisted, tried to scream, tried to slide a hand up beneath the bag, to pull it off. It snagged on her crossed hairpins, however, and a moment later he clamped a hand down over the fabric and her mouth beneath, slid a knife from his belt and held it against her side, at just the spot between the ribs where she’d stabbed him so many months earlier.
“Your choice,” he whispered, leaning forward until his mouth was just beside her ear. “Silence, or death.”
* * *
“Where is Kaden?”
Adare’s only response was to twist awkwardly, tossing her head from side to side in a pointless effort to throw off the hood.
“Don’t bother,” Valyn said. “It won’t come off. And don’t bother screaming-we’re in the storm drain two dozen paces below the streets.”
That had been the trickiest part of the whole grab. The munitions were ready to hand, and the hood, but it had taken Valyn the better part of the preceding night to find a quick route from the street where he’d kidnapped his sister to someplace he could safely interrogate her. The narrow tunnel into which he’d brought her was barely high enough to stand up straight. A few inches of filthy water trickled over his boots, draining away toward one of the canals. Dark stains, the high-water marks of earlier storms, ran along the walls. It wasn’t the perfect place-there was always the chance they’d stumble across a handful of vagrants, men and women desperate enough to make a home out of the drain during the dry season-but then, nothing was perfect. Most people he could frighten off, and anyone he couldn’t frighten, he could kill. Besides, he didn’t expect to need a lot of time.
“Who are you?” Adare demanded, her voice high, strident. “What do you want?”
“I want to know where Kaden is,” he said again. “Did you kill him?”
Adare turned her head back and forth, more slowly this time, as though she could see anything in the darkness. The rank red scent of thorny panic poured off her, along with a confusion that reeked of rancid oil, both smells so thick it was a wonder she hadn’t cracked already.
If only you’d been weak, he thought grimly.
“They’ll be searching for me,” she said. “People will be looking.…”
“They’ll be following your horse. Which is at least a mile off by now.”
“They’ll double back.…”
He nodded. “In time to find you dead.”
Adare went perfectly still, as though she were only now understanding the situation. Standing there in the murky water, bag over her head, wrists tied behind her back, she didn’t look like an emperor. She looked like a frightened woman torn from her home, ripped out of the fabric of everything she found familiar.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
A part of him was tempted to draw it out, to make her guess, to breathe in her terror when she finally started to shake.