“I’m your brother,” he said instead. “The one you tried to kill.”
The running water carved a wet course through the silence. Adare’s shallow, rapid breathing scratched against the close stone walls.
“Valyn,” she whispered finally.
His name sounded like a curse.
“Hello, sister.”
“How did you…”
“Live?”
“I stood at the end of the dock,” she said, the words low, as though she were talking only to herself, as though he weren’t there at all. “For half the day I watched them drag the lake. Every body they pulled free, I started shaking, thinking it might be yours.”
“That’s strange, considering you’re the person who put that knife between my ribs in the first place.”
She took a sharp breath, as though planning to object, then shook her head. Her fear, so sharp at first, had mostly faded, weariness washing in to replace the sick reek of terror.
“So you’re here for your revenge.”
“Among other things. First, I want to know what you did with Kaden.”
Adare shook her head again. “I didn’t do anything with him.”
Valyn gritted his teeth. “I don’t believe you. He was here, in Annur. Gwenna met with him. Then, when she came back, he had vanished, and no one seems to know where.”
“He has come and gone more than once now,” Adare said, anger’s heat creeping back into her voice. “He uses those ’Kent-kissing gates-that’s why no one sees him.”
“How convenient,” Valyn said.
“Not for me, it’s not. I’m trying to hold this fucking city together, to get ready for the Urghul, to keep Annur from tearing itself to pieces, and meanwhile the First Speaker of the council has been coming and going according to his own whims, chasing his own monsters, showing up for a few hours, then haring off after that miserable bitch from the prison.…”
She trailed off, as though worried she had said too much. Valyn closed his eyes, breathed in her tangled scent: anger, blue-gray grief, confusion, and a deep, thick musk of sickening regret. But no deceit, not that he could smell. Gritting his teeth, he reached out, lifted the hood from her head. Most of her black hair remained pinned behind her head, but a few strands hung in her face. She tried to shake them away, then gave up, glaring at him through the mess of sweaty tangles. Her eyes burned more brightly than he’d remembered, so bright in the blackness of the storm drain it seemed her whole face might catch fire. When she opened her mouth, Valyn expected a blaze of defiance. Instead, her voice was quiet, even to his ears.
“I’m sorry.”
He took a step back, as though the words themselves could burn.
“A little late to start begging.…”
“I’m not begging. From the moment I stabbed you I wanted to take it back.” She shook her head, looking past him into the prison of her memory. “It all happened so fast. Fulton dead, and you going after il Tornja, even while the battle was still playing out. I had the knife in my hand, and I thought you were going to ruin it all, that you were going to destroy Annur, and I just … broke.”
Valyn stared. Somewhere inside his chest his heart ground out its savage rhythm over and over, refusing to give up.
“Every day I wake up in the morning,” Adare went on after a pause, “knowing I killed you. What’s crazy is that most of the time I think that I was right. You’d gone utterly insane-you really were about to kill the only person who could hold the Urghul back.” She shook her head. “Somehow, in the end, being right didn’t matter.”
Valyn dragged the next words up like shattered glass through his throat. “And you think I’ll spare you for this belated sorrow?”
“I don’t care if you spare me,” she exploded. “I don’t care what you think at all. You’re even more insane now than you were then-that’s obvious just from looking at you. I’m not saying this for you. I’m saying it because for all these months I couldn’t say it, not to you, and now I can.” She raised her chin, exposing her throat. “Go ahead. Kill me. Have your revenge. Then you figure out how to save this city, this whole fucking land that used to be an empire and now is something else … something different. You find a way to fix it, to put it right, to rescue all the millions of people about to be slaughtered on Meshkent’s bloody altars, because I have no idea.”
Tears were pouring down her face, glazing her cheeks, slick as molten glass with the light of her eyes. She shook her head wearily, angrily.
“Kaden is at Kegellen’s manse. Go find him after you murder me, if you really give a shit. He needs you.”
“Needs me for what?” Valyn asked. He was shaking, he realized. His hand ached. He looked down to find the bare knife in his hand, already drawn. He didn’t remember pulling it from the sheath.
Finish it, the beast’s voice hissed. You’ve talked too long already.
He stepped forward, put the knife against her neck.
She winced, but kept her eyes fixed on his.
“Go ahead.”
Finish it.
All over again he could taste the bile of the night-black slarn egg pouring down his throat. He could feel Ha Lin limp in his arms, her heart still, her hair smelling of the sea. He could hear the hacking sounds of the legionary messenger he’d killed, feel the man’s throat give as he ripped the knife through trachea and tendon. He could smell the smoke of the burning bodies of Andt-Kyl, taste his own blood hot in his mouth, and Huutsuu’s as she screamed her awful pleasure. He could hear all over again the horror tattooed in the heartbeats of the men he’d killed atop Mierten’s crumbling wall. He could feel the rotten softness of his axes sinking into human flesh, could taste his own eagerness as he pulled them free. Whatever he could have been, he was a beast, as much a monster as the slarn prowling the gullet of Hull’s Hole, a creature of blood and darkness and death.
Finish it.
He could feel his sister shuddering beneath the blade, could taste her copper terror. It wasn’t even about justice anymore, or revenge, or any other thing to which a man could put a word. There was only the urge in the blood, the need, that vicious, undeniable imperative.
FINISH IT.
It wasn’t mercy that stopped his hand. His mercy was gone-chipped away, burned out, carved to the quick-along with whatever else had once made him a man. It wasn’t justice. It wasn’t love or even fellow human feeling. All that was gone. All that was left to balance the fury was a sort of dumb stubbornness, an animal unwillingness to simply submit, the same stubbornness that had kept him alive the whole northern winter, that made him check the traps and stuff raw meat into his mouth, the same stubbornness that kept his heart hammering stupidly away.
CUT OUT HER HEART.
Slowly, shaking, careful not to nick the skin, Valyn lowered the knife.
“No.”
58
For a long time, Kaden just watched his brother, trying to decide if Valyn believed this story of gods and goddesses trapped in human flesh, of a Csestriim genius whose whole horrible purpose was to find those gods, to flush them out and hunt them down, to destroy them, of how close il Tornja had already come, of how little time remained.
Studying Valyn’s face, it was hard to say. Those ruined eyes betrayed nothing. Kaden tried to find the brother he had known in the figure that stood before him now, prowling back and forth along the wall of Kegellen’s wine cellar like some caged animal. The boy was gone, carved away by the long years of training and privation, and even the man Kaden remembered from their brief time together in the Bone Mountains, the Kettral Wing leader, seemed to have vanished. Kaden struggled to put a name to this lean, scarred, hungry creature that stood before him now.
Valyn had arrived barely an hour earlier, appearing with Adare just after the noon gong, escorted by Kegellen herself into the mansion’s labyrinthine depths, where Kaden and Triste had been trying to figure a way around il Tornja’s soldiers and into Intarra’s Spear.