She held Adare’s gaze for a moment, then nodded once, as though that were something done, done well and finished forever. Then she smiled, tossed her cane aside, and turned away, descending the stairs toward the screaming, and the dying, and the fire.
Gwenna took a long breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out.
“Where the fuck did you find her?”
Adare just shook her head, counting off the heartbeats in her mind, each one final as the great bronze bell that had tolled her father’s passage. The stairwell shuddered, steel screamed, as though wrenched awry by some vicious hand. Adare stumbled, seized the railing to keep her balance. There was a great thunderclap, then another, and another; fires of unnatural color leapt up around them, then fizzled out in the hot air. By the time Gwenna waved them forward, the sounds from below had subsided.
“Let’s see who’s dead,” the Kettral woman said grimly. “And who’s left to kill.”
They found Nira and Oshi first, two hundred feet below, seated, leaning against the low railing with their arms wrapped around each other. At first, Adare thought they were still alive. Then she saw the blood soaking Oshi’s clothes, pooling beneath him, and the vicious wound that had caved in the side of Nira’s head.
They look so ordinary, she thought.
The palace was filled with paintings of the Atmani, storm-eyed, muscle-bound figures striding an earth that cracked and groaned beneath their very feet. Nira and Oshi, by contrast, looked small and gray, slight, like someone’s grandparents, just people like any of the people living in the city below; not rulers, just a brother and sister who had lived out a normal life. And, of course, they had. Not just one life, but dozens, all those centuries side by side, posing as peddlers and farmers, haberdashers and fisherfolk, dozens of names and disguises, one after the next. Despite the violence of their end, their eyes were closed. They may have died fighting, but Nira’s arms were wrapped around her brother, holding him as she had held him so many times before, cradling him finally to sleep.
Gwenna scanned the corpses.
“That the leach?” she asked.
Adare nodded mutely.
The woman stepped over the bodies as though they were so much stacked wood. “Il Tornja’s further down.”
Slowly, Adare let go of the railing. She was sweating, her heart beating so hard she thought she might die. “Then let’s go kill him.”
Together, the four of them descended the trembling steps.
Another twenty feet below, on a narrow landing, they came to the battle-what was left of it, at least. There were bodies, dozens of them, scores, hacked apart, strewn across the platform, the blood so thick it poured over the edge of the landing into the fiery abyss beneath. Annurians, Adare thought dully. They all wore the uniform of the Army of the North.
Amidst the carnage, there were only two men standing, one holding a slender, elegant blade, the other wielding dripping axes: Valyn and il Tornja, facing off again, just as they had that awful day on the tower in Andt-Kyl. Despite the slaughter, the kenarang looked calm, even urbane, endlessly patient. Valyn, on the other hand, might have been a monster out of nightmare, a horrifying figure in filthy wool and leather, hair plastered to his face, scarred eyes empty as the winter night. Unlike il Tornja, who stood perfectly still, poised, Valyn shifted back and forth, moving his weight from one foot to the other as though there were some violence inside him kept just barely in check.
Then, even as Adare watched, he loosed it.
She could barely follow what happened next. Despite a year of marching with her armies, despite witnessing one of the most important battles in Annurian history, Adare knew almost nothing about fighting, dueling, or swordplay. It didn’t matter. Even to her untrained eye, even in the whirlwind of all that mad, dizzying steel, the difference between the two warriors was obvious.
Valyn was faster. His axes were everywhere at once, high and low, striking in concert sometimes, sometimes in counterpoint, shattering in a steel hail against il Tornja’s guard. And yet, somehow, that guard held. The long, elegant sword was always there to deflect the blood-smeared wedges. Valyn roared and snarled his rage, but il Tornja moved in an eddy of calm. He was slower than his opponent, far slower, but was always where he needed to be, always sliding into that slender empty space where Valyn’s axes were not, as though he’d seen the whole fight in advance, had studied it for years, had rehearsed every step of this savage dance.
But there’s a gash along his arm, Adare realized as Valyn broke off his attack. Valyn’s chest was heaving, but his bloody teeth showed in something that might have been a smile.
“Hello, Adare,” il Tornja said, speaking into the momentary stillness without taking his eyes from her brother.
“Kill him, Annick,” Gwenna said.
To Adare’s shock, the kenarang dropped his blade and turned, hands raised. “I give myself up.” He met her eyes and smiled, that same smile she’d seen so many times before. There was no hint of concern in his voice. “My work here is finished, and there are Urghul to fight.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need to remind you I have your son.”
Valyn took a predatory step forward, but Adare threw up a hand. “Don’t kill him.”
She half turned to find the sniper holding that strange bow of kettral bone, the string drawn back to her ear, sighting down the arrow’s shaft at il Tornja. Annick’s eyes didn’t waver from the target, but she held the string.
“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna spat.
“Don’t kill him,” Adare said again, louder this time, more forcefully.
Valyn shifted forward, his axes light in his hands. Like Annick, he kept his scarred eyes on il Tornja even as he spoke to Adare. “We have been here before, sister.”
“Indeed we have,” the Csestriim agreed cheerfully. “You might recall that the last time, in Andt-Kyl, I urged you to put down your blades. As I told you then, there’s a lot that you don’t understand.” He spread his hands as though welcoming the group. “A lot that all of you don’t understand.”
“That was a long time ago,” Valyn said, testing the weight of his ax. “We’ve been learning.”
Then, before Adare could object, before she could even think, he spun. The movement was too fast to follow, as was the single ax hurtling toward il Tornja. Somehow-she could not begin to fathom how-the Csestriim had seen it coming, had managed to slide aside as the steel parted the air inches from his head. He turned, unconcerned, to watch it fly into the void, smiling as it disappeared into the roaring fire far below.
“That’s not what I had in mind,” he said finally, turning back to Valyn, “when I asked you to put down your blades.”
Valyn’s lips curled back, showing his teeth. “I am going to kill you,” he said. “I am going to cut you apart.”
“No,” Adare insisted, stepping forward.
“Get out of the way,” Valyn said.
She pressed ahead despite the death in his voice. “I won’t.”
“What’s wrong?” Valyn demanded. “You still want him to fight your wars? You still think you need him? You still willing, after all this, to play your fucking politics?”
“No,” Adare said, meeting her brother’s ravaged gaze as she slipped the polished poisoned hair stick-Kegellen’s gift-from the coils of her hair, then turned, slamming it into the kenarang’s gut, screaming as she shoved it deeper and deeper still, pulling it out, then stabbing him again. The Csestriim half lifted a hand as though to protest, then let it fall. Adare stared at the wound, the blood soaking the cloth, then raised her eyes to il Tornja. “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly, “because I’m going to do it.” She held the poisoned stick in her trembling hand, then buried it between his ribs once more.