The Emperor's blades

22

The morning of the start of Hull’s Trial dawned clear and cool. Valyn was relieved when the watery light finally leaked over the horizon. He had tossed and turned half the night, alternating between the worry about Ha Lin that had plagued him for the past week, and the more nebulous fear of the grueling test that lay ahead, the test that would determine the course of his life. It was all well and good to be selected as a child by the Kettral, all well and good to spend half a life training on the Islands. If you failed Hull’s Trial, it was all finished, the years of work gone like yesterday’s breeze.

Just get through the week, he kept telling himself. You can’t help anyone-not Lin, not Kaden, no one-if you don’t make it through the week.

The day was chilly for the Qirins, and as the cadets assembled on the rocky headland beneath the wide tenebral oak, a menacing black front was moving in swiftly from the north, darkening the waves beneath it and whipping their crests to a foamy chop. The storm, if it broke, would make for a dismal start to the Trial, not that the Eyrie commanders would take any more notice of the storm than they did of the inevitable injuries to come. When you signed on to be Kettral, you knew what you were getting into: sometimes it rained; sometimes people got hurt. You bandaged your wounds, buckled your slicks, and got on with it.

He looked through the group for Lin, but she stood on the far side, as far from him as it was possible to get, and met his stare only briefly, her eyes flat and unreadable. Balendin and Yurl were another matter. Yurl stood only a few feet away, chuckling under his breath with one of his minions. He caught Valyn’s gaze and winked. Valyn forced himself to breathe, to keep his hands still at his sides, to ride out the tide of blood boiling behind his eyes. He’d almost gone after the two of them right after Lin left his room in the infirmary a week earlier, had almost hauled himself out of bed, busted shoulder or no, dragged himself to wherever they were, and broken their ’Kent-kissing knees.

Oddly, it was Yurl and Balendin themselves who convinced him not to. As he was hoisting himself out of the infirmary bed, cursing to keep back the burning sickness in his gut, he remembered the fight in the ring, remembered Balendin baiting Lin until she bit, then Yurl falling upon her, goading Valyn into his own error. The two were using the same strategy now, he realized, although on a larger, more horrible scale. They knew he’d come after them. How could he not go after them, after what they did to Lin? And, as in the ring, they were planning for it. They were ready.

Valyn had no idea what sort of sick game they were playing, had no conception of the rules or the goal, but one thing was certain: Playing into their hands was the quickest way to lose, and he had no intention of losing, not this time. As the storm cloud broke overhead, he met Yurl’s eye and winked back. A shiver of unease passed over the youth’s face, and he scowled, then looked away.

The first drops were pelting the ground as Daveen Shaleel, commander of operations for northeastern Vash, stepped onto a small rostrum. She began without preamble.

“Today you will begin your Trial. If you so choose.” She paused there, shifting her eyes slowly from one cadet to the next. Shaleel was a slender woman, and well into her sixth decade, but Valyn had to force himself to meet that unbending gaze. “I am here,” she continued finally, “to convince you to forgo the ordeal.”

The words drew a surprised murmur from the assembled cadets, who glanced at one another in confusion. Eight years they had prepared for this moment, and now this woman was urging them to quit? Valyn scanned the faces. Talal looked cautious, careful. Laith seemed to think the whole thing was one more joke. Annick might have been considering the troublesome rigging of a smallboat she’d been ordered to sail around the point. Gwenna was picking something off her blacks and scowling. Only Lin showed no emotion. Her eyes were hollow, blank. Those eyes frightened Valyn more than the upcoming ordeal.

“The Trial,” Shaleel continued, once the effect of her words had subsided, “is named, as you well know, for Hull, the Lord of Darkness, the Owl King, Lord of the Night. While the various soldiers here worship as they please, it is Hull who smothers the flame, Hull who hangs darkness over the heavens like a cloak, and Hull who spins the shade and shadows that allow you to slip close enough to slide your blade between the ribs.”

Valyn was surprised to hear the long, graceful cadences from the woman. Most commanders tended to speak in the same clipped periods they had learned to rely on as soldiers in the field. Shaleel was no exception, but today, for some reason, she orated rather than spoke, as though she were leading a religious service rather than briefing her troops. Perhaps she was-the Trial, like other services, would hinge on sacrifice.

“Above all other gods, the Kettral worship Hull,” the woman continued, gesturing to the tree behind her. The hanging bats swayed from the branches, sussurating quietly with each gust of wind. “But make no mistake, soldiers. Hull has no love for you.”

Valyn looked over the crowd. Ha Lin stood almost directly across from him. He caught her eye, but she refused to hold his gaze.

“You have heard rumors about the Trial,” the woman went on, “but you have not heard the truth. The truth is, the rigors of the week ahead will bleed you, crush you, maybe even break you, but they are only a prelude. The Trial, the real Trial, begins one week from now, for those of you foolish enough to persist.”

This was news to Valyn. Everything he’d ever heard about Hull’s Trial suggested it was just one long training exercise, far more brutal, to be sure, but fundamentally no different from anything else he’d encountered. A few paces away, Gwenna muttered something about “mysterious horseshit” and spat onto the stone. The other cadets seemed equally surprised, although they handled it differently. Annick held her bow, strung and ready, as if she expected to shoot something right away, staring down the commander the way a hawk might a mouse. Sami Yurl made some sort of crack that Valyn couldn’t hear, and Balendin nodded. Unease filled the heavy air.

“The details of the Trial,” Shaleel continued, “are reserved for those who successfully navigate this first week, but I can tell you one thing: It will break some of you, break you horribly, and for life.” She paused to let her words sink in. “After eight years, no one doubts your valor. Step forward now and your labors are over. Arin awaits, just a day’s sail distant.”

Arin. The island of failures. The Eyrie had no intention of allowing Kettral-trained soldiers to return to the world to find work as mercenaries or spies, and so those unable or unwilling to complete Hull’s Trial were relocated to Arin, near the northwest end of the Qirin chain. It was the most luxurious of the Islands, more temperate and lush than the others, rising from the sea in a riot of green and blue. The empire took good care of those men and women who bowed out of the Trial, providing them with fine houses and food in perpetuity, all compliments of the good, taxpaying citizens of Annur. It was a life of leisure, a life that tens of thousands of people the continents over would have killed for, and yet, the failed soldiers paid for it with their freedom. They lived on Arin, in that tropical paradise, until they died.

No one stepped forward.

Shaleel nodded as if she had expected as much. “The offer stands,” she said. “Remember that in the days ahead. Remember it as you labor in the surf, as you struggle through the sands, as you come near to drowning in the open sea. Remember, too, that this coming week is the easy part, a gentle prelude. At any point, right through the end, you can step away from all this, you can decide that the life of the Kettral is not a life you want to live.”

The cadets stood still as stones, unwilling to risk one another’s eyes.

“All right,” Shaleel said, shaking her head as though in resignation. “The prelude to the Trial begins.” She turned to her left. “Fane. Sigrid. They’re yours for the next week.”

Adaman Fane stepped to the fore. “One thing you maggots ought to realize,” he began, a vicious smile stretching across his face, “is that I don’t think a man’s ready to be Kettral until he’s puked up his own blood.”

“What about a woman?” Gwenna shot back.

Fane grinned. “Well, you women have the higher pain tolerance, so we need to go even harder on you.”

* * *

The next six days passed in a fog of agony and exhaustion. Along with the rest of the cadets, Valyn ran until the promised blood wept from blisters and open wounds, swam until he thought he would sink to the bottom of the sound, then dragged his aching body out of the water to run some more. He crawled on his belly for miles over firespike and broken rock, carried an entire tree trunk across the island, then carried it back, wrestled Talal until both of them collapsed into the dirt of the ring, panting for a few hopeless breaths before a boot kicked him in the ribs and a voice told him to run some more. He navigated the coastline in a leaking smallboat with a plank of wood for a paddle. Then they took the plank away and told him to do it again; for half the night he clawed at the surf with his hands, trying to drag the tiny vessel forward.

Each day around noon the cooks slopped a few dozen dead rats, still slick and glistening from the drowning pots, onto the ground outside the ring. That was the only food. Valyn tried to force the meat down, ripping out the liver and heart, cracking the slender bones for the marrow while blood and viscera coated his already filthy fingers. The first day, he vomited it all back up. He cursed himself all night as his gut gnawed at itself angrily, impotently. The next day, he ate everything, even the eyes and soft putty of the brain, and he kept it down.

Like ghosts or apparitions, the trainers were everywhere, looming above the groveling cadets, alternately ridiculing their efforts and extending the soft, treacherous hand of relief.

“You don’t have to do this,” the Flea murmured to Valyn at some point on the fourth day, leaning over him as he tried to haul a huge barrel of sand up out of the surf. “I’ll tell you, kid-you think this is bad? It only gets worse.”

Valyn growled something cross and incomprehensible, even to himself, and kept pushing the barrel.

“Son of an Emperor,” the man mused. “Lot of options for you. Maybe you don’t even need to go to Arin. We could make an exception. Why don’t you call it a day? We’ll get you cleaned up. Set you up on a fast ship home. No shame in it.”

“Piss. Off,” Valyn snarled, yanking the recalcitrant barrel furiously, freeing it from the wet, sucking sand, then throwing his weight behind it as he struggled up the dunes. The Flea chuckled, but he went away.

Not all of the cadets resisted. The pain and exhaustion mounted every day, every hour, every minute, until it seemed that the sun had ground to a halt in its course through the heavens and the unbearable suffering would go on forever, longer than forever, an eternity of misery devised by Meshkent himself. The verdant shore of Arin beckoned, a paradise of leisure and ease to be had just by … stopping, by giving up. Valyn finally understood the true genius of the offer. Put a man’s back to the wall, and he’s got no choice but to fight; offer him a comfortable retirement before the age of twenty, and you learn who’s committed to the cause. Valyn watched with a pang of exhausted envy as one, then two, then six cadets abandoned the Trial, gave themselves up to the quiet blandishments of the trainers.

Don’t even think about it, he muttered to himself, straining to lug yet another sand-filled barrel out of the sea. Whatever the Flea claimed, failure meant Arin, Arin meant never leaving the Islands, and that meant leaving Kaden and Adare vulnerable, Amie and Ha Lin unavenged. Don’t even dream about it.

On the fifth day, he found himself next to Gwenna, both of them harnessed like oxen to a large cart filled with small boulders. Jakob Rallen, the Master of Cadets, sat perched atop the pile, a whip in his right hand.

“Onward, mules!” he shouted in that shrill voice of his, cracking the whip close enough to Valyn’s ear that it drew blood. “Onward.”

Gwenna glanced over. Half her face had purpled with a vicious bruise, but there was no surrender in those green eyes. “On three?” she gasped, leaning forward to brace herself against the halter.

“What if we just strangled him with the whip and called it a day?” Valyn asked, forcing his weight against the collar, driving with his legs until the whole wagon creaked reluctantly into motion. The whip came down again, this time nicking Gwenna’s cheek.

“Strangling’s not my style,” she replied. She was a head shorter than Valyn, but she was strong, and with the two of them hauling the cart, it slowly gained speed, jolting over the rocky ground.

“How ’bout a flickwick in his bed?” Valyn gasped, heaving air into his ragged lungs as he strained against the traces.

“Too quick. Plus, a slob like him-we’d be scraping gobbets of fat off the ceiling.”

Valyn grinned in spite of the pain. “What if we toss him out of the cart and drag the thing over him?”

“I’ll follow your lead, oh my prince,” Gwenna replied before another crack of the whip silenced both of them.

He caught occasional glimpses of Ha Lin. On the third day, he managed to watch her briefly as she swam the harbor, dragging a barge behind her, her face a rictus of determination. He wanted to call out, to offer some encouragement, but it was all he could do to stand, and she was clearly past hearing anything but the salt waves sloshing in her ears. He tried to linger, to wait for her to reach the breakwater, but one of the trainers drove a hard fist into his kidney and sent him stumbling off down the rocks for yet another torturous circuit of the coast.

Each evening, the grinding midday sun bled into the horizon, and Valyn struggled on in darkness, shivering and chattering in the waves, his mind worn to a dull nub, his body depleted past pain, past suffering, into dead, leaden numbness.

At some point on what he thought was the sixth day, he found himself side by side in the surf with Laith, the two of them wrestling a swamped smallboat up out of the waves.

“Pull,” Valyn urged him, straining at the ropes himself until he thought his tendons would tear. “Pull!”

“If you tell me to pull one more time,” Laith responded breathlessly, hauling for all he was worth, “I am going to put down these ropes and bash the nose into your royal face.”

Valyn had no idea if it was a joke or not. The other cadet certainly sounded serious, but after six days of dead rat and endless agony, he didn’t care. “Pull!” he shouted again, bursting into helpless laughter. Some dim, lost part of him recognized the insanity in the sound, but it was powerless to stop it. “Pull, you fucker!” he screamed.

Laith bellowed right back at him, words as crazed and desperate as his own, and together they dragged that boat up onto the shingle only to be told to dump it, right it, and then swim it out to the ship swinging at anchor a mile offshore.

Valyn was convinced during that swim that he was going to die. His heart had never hammered so hard inside his chest. He felt like every breath was bringing up blood and lung, and when he spat into the waves, he saw pink flecking the foam. It was possible, he knew, for the body to simply quit. Cadets had died of burst hearts before, their bodies battered, then broken under the physical strain. Fine, he panted to himself, towing the recalcitrant boat through the waves toward that ship that never seemed to grow any closer. This is a fine place to die.

When he heaved himself onto the deck at last, the Flea and Adaman Fane were there, scowling and shouting something Valyn couldn’t understand. What were the words? He peered around blearily for something to haul, to hit, to hurt, but there was nothing, just the wide expanse of scrubbed deck. As he stared in stupefaction, the words started to penetrate, like water dripping through a poorly thatched roof.

“… you hear me, you idiot?” Fane was shouting, waving a thick finger at him from a few feet away. “You’re done, at least for now. I suggest you hit the deck and get a few hours’ sleep.”

Valyn stared, his jaw slack. Then his legs collapsed beneath him and he fell into stunned, desperate darkness.