It seemed, now, that that boy, the one who had raced and grinned, was gone. Almost a decade among the Shin had sanded the easy smile from his face. The dark hair was gone, shaved. Though his eyes still burned, the fire was distant now, cold, as the fire in her father’s eyes had been. Adare might not even have recognized him, were it not for that one day on the seaward wall a decade earlier. What she saw, when she looked at him now, was that stillness, that silence, that utterly unfathomable gaze.
“Your return to the city was not a matter of desire,” Kaden said finally. “It was a matter of necessity.”
She shook her head, weary and confused. “If we were going to be on the same side anyway, you could have decided to join forces a little earlier. Right when you got back to Annur, for instance. Instead of tearing each other apart, we could have been allies all this time, a united Malkeenian front.”
“A united Malkeenian front,” Kaden repeated, studying her. Adare felt like some rare bug beneath that gaze, a specimen carried in from the northern forests. “We’d need Valyn for that,” he went on after a moment. “Do you have any idea where he is?”
Adare’s heart lurched inside her. She forced her face to stay still. She kept her eyes on the waves, kept lazily kicking her feet in the water as the awful scene played out inside her mind all over again: Valyn appearing from nowhere on the roof of the tower in Andt-Kyl; Valyn stabbing Fulton, her last Aedolian; the hot blood pumping from beneath Fulton’s armor; the guardsman’s body so horribly heavy as Adare tried to lift him; the way the steel refused to come free; Valyn threatening il Tornja, threatening to kill the only general who could save Annur; the knife light in Adare’s hand, then buried in her brother’s side; her own screaming like a spike in her skull.…
Maybe there had been another choice, but she hadn’t seen it at the time. Without il Tornja, they would have been lost; the Urghul would have crushed all of Annur beneath the hooves of their horses months ago. Valyn had gone wild, had become half insane, judging from the look in his eyes. He’d been nothing at all like the boy Adare remembered; all the play was gone, all the joy and mischief, replaced by hate, and horror, and black, obliterating rage. And so she’d done what she needed to do to save the empire. Adare had been over her own reasoning scores of times, hundreds, since watching his limp body tumble from the tower’s top into the waves below. She could find no other choice-not then, not in the long months since. That knowledge did nothing to stop the nightmares.
“The last time I saw Valyn,” she replied, careful to meet Kaden’s eyes, to keep her voice level, not too loud, skirting the border of indifference, “he was a kid getting on a ship for the Qirin Islands.”
She forced herself to breathe in once, then out slowly. A lie, like a midwinter fire, was not a thing to rush.
Instead of responding, Kaden just watched her with those burning eyes. No emotion played over his face. He might have been looking at a blank wall, or a patch of ragged grass, but he kept looking, on and on, until Adare felt a sweat break out on the back of her neck.
He can’t know, she reminded herself. There’s no way he could know.
Those eyes continued to burn. She felt like a hare, some small, hot-blooded creature caught in a hunter’s snare.
What if someone saw? The voice inside her head sounded like Nira. Thousands of poor bastards in the battle just below-one of them might’a seen you put that knife between Valyn’s ribs.
For months, Adare had worried about just that. After all, a body falling from a tower wasn’t tremendously hard to miss. On the other hand, when Valyn stumbled from the tower, bleeding and reeling, his own knife stuck in his side, he’d fallen south, toward the lake, away from anyone watching. More importantly, the whole thing had played out while the battle was still raging in the streets below. All those close enough to see would have been fighting desperately, each man swinging a sword or dodging one. There had been no time, no space, for the study of Andt-Kyl’s limited skyline.
That, at any rate, was what Adare had told herself, and every day that went by without someone asking questions, demanding answers, raised in her the hope that Valyn’s death had gone unremarked, that it would remain undiscovered. It should have been a relief, that ongoing silence; the last thing she needed was a story of royal fratricide burning through the remnants of the empire. The absence of comment on the killing should have felt like a blessing; it did not.
History’s brutal truths-the wars and famines, tyrannies and genocides-were a burden shared among millions. The truth of that murder atop the tower, however, was Adare’s alone. The only witness, Ran il Tornja, was Csestriim, and for all his bonhomie and banter, incapable in his very bones of understanding what it had cost Adare to drive that knife between her brother’s ribs. The story was hers, as was the silence, and there were days when both weighed more than she thought she could bear.
She shook her head. “I wish that we knew where Valyn was. I’d trade half of Raalte for a loyal Kettral Wing.” She sharpened her gaze, fixed it on Kaden. “My spies told me that you might know where he is. That the two of you had some contact after he fled the Islands.”
“Spies?” Kaden asked, raising his brows.
“Yes,” Adare replied. “Spies. Men and women who pretended to be siding with you, but were really siding with me. Surely even your inept wreckage of a republic has spies.”
He nodded slowly. “What did they tell you, exactly?”
“That Valyn fled the Islands in disgrace. That he came to you. Maybe that he rescued you. Is it true?”
Kaden nodded again. “True enough. And our spies tell me that there was a Kettral Wing at the battle of Andt-Kyl. They say that a woman with red hair took charge before the arrival of the Army of the North. There were explosions. Kettral-style demolitions. People saw a girl in Kettral blacks who looked almost like a boy.” He watched her watching him. “The descriptions sound like soldiers on Valyn’s Wing. Gwenna Sharpe. Annick Frencha.”
Adare nodded. “I saw them from the tower,” she said, cleaving as close as possible to the truth. “No one knew who they were.”
“Not even il Tornja? He is the kenarang. The Kettral fall under his command.”
“That doesn’t mean he memorized the face of every cadet. And, in case your spies didn’t mention it, there was a battle that day. Il Tornja was trying to stop Long Fist, not play Guess the Kettral.”
“But there was no sign of Valyn? Up there in the north?”
Adare shook her head. “If he was there, I didn’t see him. Of course, there was a battle going on, tens of thousands of soldiers.…”
Kaden hesitated, as though considering whether or not to press the issue, then frowned. It was the only real expression she’d seen from him since he joined her on the dock.
“What about Long Fist?” he asked finally. “Was the Urghul chieftain at the battle?”
It was a new line of conversation; dangerous, but not as dangerous as the discussion of Valyn.
“No,” Adare replied. “A Kettral deserter named Balendin commanded the Urghul. A leach, evidently. He held up the bridges.”
“I know Balendin,” Kaden said quietly. “I almost killed him in the Bone Mountains. He is dangerous.”