There was no sign that Valyn’s death bothered him.
Gwenna glanced over her shoulder at Annick, met Talal’s gaze for a moment, then turned back to Kaden. “I’ll need to discuss it with the Wing.”
“What if I could furnish you with a ship back to the Islands?”
“The fight’s coming here,” Annick broke in from the doorway. “Not to the Eyrie.”
Kaden nodded. “And it would help us to win that fight if we had birds. Even two or three could make an enormous difference. We could have accurate reports of troop movements, could convey orders from army to army more quickly, could even attempt to get at … Long Fist, or Balendin, without going through the entire Urghul army.”
Gwenna studied his impassive face, then turned away, staring at the swirling dust motes, trying to sift her emotions from her reasoning.
“It makes sense,” Talal said at last. “Any birds that survived the battle will stay on the Islands. They won’t leave their roosts.”
“I could get you a ship,” Kaden added. “Ready to sail on the morning tide.”
Gwenna shook her head angrily. “A ship will take forever, and Annick’s right. The fight is coming here, it is coming now. Why didn’t you send someone nine months ago?”
“We did,” Kaden said, meeting her gaze. “We’ve sent half a dozen expeditions.”
“And?”
“And none of them returned.”
“What happened to them?” Talal asked.
Kaden shook his head. “We have no idea.”
“Let me get this straight,” Gwenna said. “You sent Daveen Shaleel back to the Islands to recover birds and she just fucking disappeared?”
“No. Shaleel wanted to go, but the council refused. She was the highest-ranking Kettral to survive, to return to Annur. Even without a bird or a full Wing, she’s too valuable to risk.”
“But we’re expendable,” Gwenna said.
Kaden met her gaze. “Yes. You’re expendable.” He raised his brows. “Will you go?”
“Well, shit.” She turned to her Wing. “Talal? Annick?”
“I don’t see that we have any other choice,” the leach replied gravely.
Annick just nodded.
Gwenna studied them both a moment. Once again, it was up to her to make the final ’Kent-kissing choice.
“Fine,” she said finally. “Whatever’s waiting there, it can’t kill us unless we fuck up.”
7
“Twenty paces,” Lehav insisted grimly. “With weapons ready to hand.”
Adare shook her head. “Fifty paces. No swords visible.”
“That’s insane. A mob could kill you a dozen times over before my men got close enough to help.”
“It would have to be a very efficient mob, Lehav. Either that, or you brought a hundred of your slowest men.”
The soldier had pointed out half a dozen times that his new name, the name given to him by the goddess Intarra in a dream, was Vestan Ameredad-the Shield of the Faithful. She continued to use the name he had given her when they first met, both of them in mud up to the ankles, down in Annur’s Perfumed Quarter.
Shielding the faithful was all well and good, but Adare was surrounded by people with new names, new identities, surrounded by lies and lives meticulously tailored to cover the truth and obscure the past. Lehav, at least, she could call by the name his mother had given him when he was still bloody and squirming, before he ever heard of Annur, or Intarra, or Adare herself. A given name was a strange thing to insist on, but it struck Adare as a sort of honesty, and there weren’t so many truths lying around that she could afford to give them up.
He was young, this commander of the Sons of Flame-maybe half a dozen years older than Adare herself-but he had a soldier’s hands and a zealot’s eyes. Adare had watched him whip his men for laxity and blasphemy, had seen him kneeling in prayer in the Aergad snow during the dawn hour and at dusk, had glimpsed him from her tower running his circuits of the walls, breath steaming in the icy air. She remembered their meeting in Olon almost a year earlier, when he had threatened to feed her to the flames. He might be young, but he was harder than most men she had met, and he approached his duty as her guardian with the same cold fervor he brought to the rest of his life.
Now, staring at her, he shook his head. “The five score men you allowed me are my most reliable, but they are five score against the population of an entire city. Your Radiance.”
The honorific still came slowly to the commander of the Sons of Flame. There was no disrespect in the words, but most of the time, as now, they sounded like an afterthought, a title to which he remained more or less indifferent.
It was a good reminder, if Adare needed a reminder, of the complexity of her situation. Il Tornja and the legions fought for her because she was a Malkeenian, the only Malkeenian left who seemed willing to sit the Unhewn Throne. Lehav, however, and all the Sons of Flame, retained their old distrust of the empire. They followed Adare because of what had happened at the Everburning Well, because of the tracery of shining scar laid into her flesh, for the flames in her eyes. It was Intarra’s touch upon her that they trusted. The empire she was working so hard to preserve was incidental at best, disposable.
“Whatever we’ve been doing in Aergad for the past nine months,” Adare went on, “Annur is my city, my capital. I grew up here.”
“So did I,” he replied, “and I learned early not to trust it. Not Annur. Not Annurians.”
“Good,” Adare said, eyes on the city sprawled out to the south. “Your job isn’t to trust people-it’s to keep me safe.”
That, too, was a change. There was a score of Aedolian guardsmen in Aergad, men Fulton had swept up when passing through Annur almost a year earlier. Adare had no cause to fault their devotion or their service, but after Aats-Kyl, they worried her.
According to Valyn, a contingent of Aedolians had come for Kaden, had murdered close to two hundred monks in a failed effort to kill him. Fulton, the Aedolian who had watched over her since childhood, had proven his loyalty a dozen times over, proven it with his death. The others, however, were just so many vaguely familiar faces, a lot of big men in bright armor. Aedolians swore to guard the imperial family, but Adare had not forgotten that it was Ran il Tornja, hundreds of years earlier and wearing a different name, who had founded the Aedolian Guard.
The Sons of Flame, on the other hand, were hers; she had risked everything to make peace with them in Olon, and they had followed her north, first to fight il Tornja, then in a desperate scramble to stop the Urghul. For nearly a year now they had marched beneath her banner, sung their hymns and offered their prayers as they guarded her in camp and castle, bled and died for their goddess of light and for Adare, the woman they believed to be Intarra’s prophet. And so the Sons of Flame had come south, to Annur, while the Aedolians were conscripted into their own unit to fight the Urghul.
The march to Annur had been exhausting, and not just physically. The long miles between Aergad and the capital offered a catalogue of the ways in which Adare had failed her empire. Though it was spring, half the fields they had passed lay fallow-the farmers fled, whether from the Urghul or the threat of banditry, Adare couldn’t say. Three towns they passed had been burned to the ground, and nearly every day they passed bodies, some rotting silently in ditches, some hung from the limbs of blackpines. In most cases, it was impossible to say whether the killings had been crimes or rough justice.
Not that it mattered. Annur was collapsing; and though Adare dreaded her arrival in the capital, dreaded the fate she might face there, with each mile she grew more convinced of the necessity of her return, of the need to try, at least, to heal the horrible rift cleaving her nation. Every body they passed was a spur in her side, every burned farm a reproach urging her to hurry, hurry. Now that they had arrived, it was time to see if she would survive her precipitous return.