Adare clamped down on her surprise. She had heard no account linking the leach to Kaden, but there was a lot she hadn’t heard in the madness of the months following her father’s death. She tried to imagine Kaden killing anyone, let alone a Kettral-trained leach. He wasn’t a warrior-that much was obvious at a glance-but those eyes … She shivered, then looked away, watching the ships swinging at anchor. Gulls gathered in the rigging. Every so often, one would scream, drop into a dive, then pull a fish, wet and writhing, from the waves.
“Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe the leach,” Adare replied after a pause. “He had his prisoners dragged out into the open, then torn limb from limb. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he helped.”
Kaden just nodded. “It is his well. He leaches off their terror of him, their hatred and revulsion, uses it to do … what he does.”
“I’ll tell you what he does,” Adare said, the memory fresh and horrible even after so many months. “He raises up whole bridges for his army to cross. He smashes down walls.” She shook her head. “He can squeeze his fingers from a hundred paces off, and a man’s head will explode inside his helmet.”
“It will only get worse,” Kaden replied. “As more people come to fear him, his power will grow.”
“Which is why il Tornja and I have been trying to stop the bastard. You’re down here playing mapmaker with those fucking idiots on the council, but everything is happening in the north, Kaden.”
“Everything?” he asked quietly. “I know about Balendin, but was Long Fist there?”
Adare hesitated, running her mind over the truth’s twisting fabric. It was all woven together: il Tornja’s identity and Valyn’s death, the truth about Long Fist and the truth about Nira and Oshi. Once you gave up one of those truths, it was hard to stop. One thread led to another, and pretty soon you could find you’d ripped apart the whole fabric, find it scattered in tatters around you.
“Adare,” Kaden said, eyes fixed on her. “I need to know what was going on up there. Horrible things could happen if we fail to act.”
“Horrible things have already happened. To me. To you. To Annur.” She waved a hand vaguely northward. “They are still fucking happening, Kaden. You haven’t been to the north. You haven’t see the flayed corpses left by the Urghul. The charred bodies of the children. The women taken apart slowly, limb by limb. Have you even been outside the ’Kent-kissing capital since you returned?”
He shook his head slowly. “The work is here.…”
“The work is everywhere. Bandits choke off half our roads. Fishermen have discovered they can make more coin as petty pirates. Trade is down. Theft is up. You’ve lost half of Hanno and Channary to the Waist tribes, if anything I’ve heard is true. The Manjari are poking their noses over the Ancaz. Freeport and the Federated Cities are murdering us on tariffs. The whole thing is coming apart at the seams.
“You think I’m reckless because I rode into Annur alone, unannounced, and burned down your idiotic hall?” She stabbed a finger at him. “What about you? You and your republic have been cautious, you’ve been measured, you debate for eight or nine days about whether or not to fly more flags from the walls of the Dawn Palace, and you are getting killed for it.”
She paused, breathing heavily, then corrected herself. “No. You aren’t getting killed. Other people, other Annurians, people who don’t have red walls to hide behind-they’re the ones getting killed for the decisions you make. Or fail to make.”
If he was taken aback by the tirade, it didn’t show. He gazed at her steadily, then nodded. “I understand your urgency. It will not save lives, however, to hurl ourselves heedlessly in one direction or another.”
Adare was already shaking her head. “This is like something our father would have said. He thought everything through-thought it through far better than you have-tried to figure all the angles, had a ’Kent-kissing plan, and what did he get for it? A blade between the ribs.” She bit down hard, partly to keep from saying anything else, partly to choke back her grief.
Kaden just sat there, hands folded in his lap, studying her as though she were a blue-fin striper dumped out on the dock to flop herself to death. The mention of Sanlitun’s murder brought no expression to his face.
“It was your general who killed him,” he said finally, quietly. “Ran il Tornja killed our father.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?”
He blinked. “It’s hard to know what to think.”
“Yes, Kaden. It is hard. But that doesn’t mean you can just quit doing it.”
“I haven’t quit.”
“Is that right?” Adare demanded. “What is it you’ve been doing then, these past nine months? You destroyed an empire that brought peace and prosperity for hundreds of years-I’ll grant you that-and then what?”
Someone else, anyone else, would have responded to the challenge. Nira would have slapped her. Lehav would have argued with her. Ran il Tornja would have laughed at her, and Ran il Tornja was one of the ’Kent-kissing Csestriim. Kaden just shook his head.
“The situation is more difficult than you understand.”
“And what makes you think,” she demanded, bringing her voice under control, “that you have any idea what I understand?”
“There are other threats than the Urghul. More dire threats.”
“Of course there are,” she spat. “I just got done listing half of them. There are so many threats that the Urghul sometimes actually seem quaint. At least they’re just a bloodthirsty horde with a fairly predictable plan to smash through the Army of the North and put the entire empire to the sword. It’s really a somewhat old-fashioned notion, if you think about it.”
“The Urghul may be a simple, bloodthirsty horde,” Kaden replied, “but the man commanding them is not. And your general, Ran il Tornja-he is not simply a general.”
A cold prickling ran up Adare’s spine. She started to respond, then stopped. Just like that, they had returned to the dangerous ground of half-truths and qualified revelations. Kaden met her eyes. There was no eagerness there, no uncertainty. She couldn’t see anything at all in those blazing irises. She had expected this, had planned for it, but she had not realized it would come so abruptly.
She glanced over her shoulder. The Aedolians were a hundred paces off, standing with their backs turned at the end of the dock. She lowered her voice anyway. “Ran il Tornja is Csestriim,” she said.
Kaden nodded. “I know. Which means the child you bore him is also Csestriim, at least in part.”
He delivered the words quietly, almost indifferently, as though he were a servant murmuring a message of little consequence. It took all Adare’s restraint not to hit him.
“I did not bear him a child,” she hissed, voice a blade honed against her rage. “Having a son was not something I did for il Tornja. Sanlitun is not some trinket, some prize that I produced from between my legs to please the great general. My child is my own.”
Kaden didn’t even blink in the face of her fury. “And yet your son links il Tornja more closely to the throne.”
“Il Tornja doesn’t want the fucking throne.”
“Not as an end in itself, perhaps, but as a means, a tool. He is Csestriim, Adare.”
Slowly, painfully, she shackled her pounding heart, choked back the words flooding up into her throat, forced herself to be still. Waves rustled beneath the dock like something alive and tireless. She watched her brother, trying to gauge her next play from the shifting fire in his eyes. After a moment, she decided to throw the dice. “As is the one you call Kiel.”
“He is.”
For a while they just sat, as though the truths they had both just uttered were too large to move past. The waves were growing colder as the sun sagged behind the palace, and Adare pulled her feet from the water, hugging her knees to her chest. An east wind had picked up, tossing her hair in her face. She shivered.