“All right,” Gwenna said wearily, settling herself on a knobby mangrove root, feet dangling in the warm water, “now that we’re all good and bloody, maybe someone can start explaining what in Hull’s name is going on.”
The woman, Qora, hissed in irritation. “We’re not safe here. They’ll have birds in the air-”
“Last time I checked,” Gwenna said, cutting her off, “birds can’t see through forest canopy, and neither can the people who fly them. Birds are excellent, on the other hand, at spotting the bobbing heads of desperate swimmers in full daylight, so if you want to keep swimming, then by all means,” she gestured toward the bright light filtering through the seaward verge of the mangroves, “swim.”
Not the most diplomatic approach, maybe, but it had been a long night. Gwenna had only counted ten or so of the Kettral-the ones with the blacks and the birds-in the central square. As she fled through the streets, however, dragging Qora along by the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the neck, the bastards kept turning up, leaping out of alleyways, dropping off rooftops. Gwenna killed at least three, Qora finished off one more, but they just kept coming. It made sense, in retrospect: if you were going to burn down a whole town, you wanted to bring enough soldiers to do the job right.
In the end, it was the night that saved them-Hull’s darkness covering their retreat. That and the tortuous trail over the ridge. Gwenna could see the path just fine in the starlight, but Qora kept tripping, lurching into the thick vines to either side. Judging from the calls and curses behind them, their pursuers were having an even tougher time-more evidence that they weren’t true Kettral, that wherever they’d scrounged up those smoke steel blades, however they’d managed to wrangle their way onto the birds, they’d never been down into Hull’s Hole, never been bitten by the slarn, never chugged that disgusting slop from inside the egg. It was an advantage. A small one, but Gwenna wasn’t in a position to be choosy.
Annick and Talal had met them at the beach in the dim hour before dawn. The leach was half carrying a young man with a head wound, the other half of Qora’s sloppily laid trap. He was pale-skinned, his shaved head a white reflection of Qora’s own. His shirt had torn away during the escape, and when he doubled over to puke, Gwenna noticed the spreading wings of a kettral tattooed across his broad shoulders.
“Jak,” Qora had gasped, lurching across the sand toward the reeling soldier, clutching his shoulders as though he were made of dirt and starting to crumble, as though she meant to hold him together with nothing more than the force of her hands. “Are you all right?”
He’d nodded unsteadily, pushing himself free of Talal. Blood sheeted his face, obscuring his features. “Looks worse than it is…”
“Can you swim?” Gwenna asked.
Jak glanced at the black, lapping waves. “Normally, yes, but…” He raised his fingers gingerly to the nasty gash across his scalp, swayed, then shuddered. “I … maybe…”
“Maybe’s not good enough,” Gwenna replied. She pointed at the cliff above. Even in the dark, their pursuers were getting close. “If you can’t swim, you’re on your own.”
“He’s a liability if we leave him alive,” Annick said.
Qora spun about to confront the sniper. “What are you suggesting?”
“That we bring him,” Annick said, not bothering to look over. “Or we kill him. I’m fine either way.”
The man named Jak stared at Annick, then turned to Gwenna. “Who in Hull’s name are you?” he whispered.
“No one,” Gwenna said. There was something about the man, about his voice or his bloody face, that nagged at her memory, but she couldn’t place it. “Just sightseeing. Heard Hook was nice this time of year. Now get in the fucking water. Head north.”
“Look at him,” Qora demanded, leaning forward. “He can barely stand. We need a different plan.”
“By all means,” Gwenna said, gesturing to the ocean behind them, the tiered limestone looming above. “I always enjoy hearing plans.” She paused, put a cupped hand to her ear. “If you wait just a minute, our friends on the ridgeline will be here. You can tell them about it, too.”
Qora’s jaw tightened. “Leave us, then, if you’re scared. We’ll take care of ourselves.”
“Because that’s been working out so well.”
“Gwenna,” Talal said, gesturing to the east. “Normally I’d take the time to talk, but…”
She nodded, turning back to Qora. “Look. I understand that you like this guy. Maybe he’s your pasty brother. Maybe the two of you have been grinding hips when you should have been training. Doesn’t matter. I’m not sure if you were paying attention back there, but he abandoned you. I was watching when those bastards in black tightened their net, and do you want to know what he did?”
Waves ground a thousand thousand small stones down the surface of the narrow beach. The west wind had picked up, flicking spray off the sea. The shouts on the cliff were closer, at least ten voices, male, angry, and confused. Annick half drew her bow and stepped out from the shadows, eyeing the rough trail they had just descended.
“Give the word,” the sniper said. “I’ll have a shot as soon as they come over the ridge.”
Gwenna shook her head. “They’re just guessing we’re down here. No reason to confirm it.” She turned her attention to Jak once more, trying again to remember where she’d seen him, how she remembered him.
“How about it, asshole?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You want to tell your lady friend how you left her to twist in the wind?”
She had expected defiance or fury, expected him to snarl or come at her. Instead, his face crumpled. It took a moment for her to realize, shocked, that the star-bright lines carved through the drying blood smeared across his face … those were tears.
“I couldn’t…,” he began. “I just … I couldn’t.…”
Some old instinct shifted inside her; pity, she realized after a moment. Whoever the poor fucker was, he wasn’t Kettral. Not everyone had trained half a lifetime to face down a dozen killers in a crowd. Clearly, Jak hadn’t volunteered to battle men with smoke steel blades and murderous birds, and he was hardly the first person to freeze like a fawn when the blood started flying.
None of that mattered. What mattered was getting away, getting clear. Gwenna had always been a shitty card player, but it was time to bluff, so she took a deep breath and bluffed: “You can swim, or I can kill you quick. Your call.”
Jak’s head jerked up. She saw the fear blaze through his eyes, hot and bright as lightning. She might have felt bad, but there was no time for feeling bad.
She slid her knife from the sheath. “I’ll count to one.”
The man held up his hands. “I’ll swim.”
* * *
Gwenna ended up having to drag him the last few hundred paces, stroking with one arm and scissor-kicking hard while she kept the other hand clamped over his chest. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked. They reached a thick stand of mangroves just before dawn, slipping into the twisting waterways between the roots. Anyone trying to track them would need to do so over a mile of open ocean, and the mangroves themselves would pose even more difficulty for their pursuers.
As a cadet, Gwenna had always hated the mangrove stands-the trees were too thick to allow swimming, the water too deep for easy wading, the branches just the right level to take out an eye. You could spend half a morning covering half a mile, especially if you were trying not to make noise. Bad territory for training exercises, but a great spot to regroup. There’d been no sign of pursuit since the beach, but that wasn’t a reason to get stupid. Whatever the next step, she planned to wait out the daylight among the knobby, twisted trees. Which gave them all plenty of time to get acquainted.
Gwenna eased back against one of the trunks, balanced a naked blade on her knees, then pointed a finger at Qora.
“So. Where should we start?”
“We can start,” Qora spat, “with the fact that you blew our best chance at killing those bastards.”
For a moment Gwenna could only stare.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said finally.
“I’m not kidding. We had it set up, Jak and I. We’d figured the whole scene, and then you assholes showed up, whoever the fuck you are.…”
Qora trailed off, breathing hard. Gwenna looked over at Talal, wondering if she was losing her mind. The leach just shrugged. He was sitting on a twisted root a pace away, a hand on Jak’s shoulder, steadying the man as he vomited up the last salt water from the swim. It was disgusting, but at least it kept him from talking. The more Qora talked, the more Gwenna wanted to spend a little time drowning her.
“You were about to get killed…,” Gwenna said, trying to keep her voice level, reasonable.
“No!” Qora said, eyes huge and furious. “I had an exit. You didn’t see how we set it up.”
“And did you see the men moving toward you through the crowd?”
The woman nodded. “I saw both of them.”
Gwenna raised her brows. “Both? There were five.”
“Henk and his gang were still on the dock.”
Gwenna shook her head. “You were looking at the wrong thing.”
“I was looking at the sons of bitches who have been hunting us like dogs for the better part of a year.”
“Like I said,” Gwenna replied. “The wrong thing.”
Jak groaned, then raised his head. “What do you mean?” he asked quietly. The long swim had washed the blood from his face, and Gwenna studied him for a few heartbeats, tumbling his name over and over in her head. Jak. Who in Hull’s name was Jak? The answer eluded her, as it had all night. She turned back to Qora.
“Look at this,” she said, holding a hand above her head, fluttering the fingers slightly. Qora looked up. Gwenna drove a fist into her gut, caught the back of her neck, and shoved her head underwater. The woman struggled and splashed, clawed indiscriminately at Gwenna’s leg, at the sprawling mangrove roots, battered pointlessly at the water. Annick shifted to avoid the thrashing. Qora was stronger than she looked, but strong didn’t matter much when you couldn’t breathe. Jak, eyes huge as plates, started to move, but Talal brought him up short with a knife at the neck.
“Don’t worry,” Gwenna said, satisfied to hear that she’d kept the anger out of her voice. “It’s all right.”
She counted to fifteen, then dragged the woman up, shoving her into one of the mangrove trunks just in time to avoid getting puked on. Qora choked and coughed and swore, looked like she was going to lunge for Gwenna, then subsided, jaw clenched with suppressed fury, brown eyes ablaze.
“If you keep looking at the wrong things,” Gwenna explained patiently, “you’re not going to make it.”
The woman coughed once more, hacking up half a lungful of water. “Fuck you.”
“Not my type,” Gwenna replied. Her patience was fraying. She thought back to the Flea, tried to channel something of his unflappable calm. “We’re trying to help you.”
“By drowning me?” Qora spat. “By putting a knife to my friend’s throat?”
Gwenna looked over at Talal. “He’s all right.”
The leach met her eyes, then slipped the blade back into its sheath.
“There,” Gwenna said. “Can we talk like adults now?”
Qora shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked again.
“We are confused,” Gwenna said. “Confusion makes us nervous, and when I’m nervous I start holding heads underwater. So maybe you could take the first turn answering questions.”
On the whole, it felt like a very temperate proposition. Qora, however, didn’t look at all pacified. She looked ready to keep fighting, if you could call having your head stuffed under the water and held there fighting. Gwenna blew out a breath and got ready for the next round, but Talal leaned forward instead, putting a conciliatory hand between them.
“We came to help,” he murmured.
“That’s what I said!” Gwenna protested. “I already said that.”
Talal nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on Qora. “We came to help,” he said again.
“To help who?” Qora demanded.
“Whoever’s fighting the men with the birds. Soldiers flying kettral have already killed some of our friends. They tried to kill us. If you’re against them, we’re with you.”
Gwenna leaned back against the narrow trunk of the mangrove. Probably she should have let Talal do the talking from the start. He had a way of bringing people around without holding their heads underwater. She forced herself to relax, to close her eyes, to feel the late-morning sun filtering down through the leaves, bright and hot. She might not be great with the talking, but at least she understood when to shut up and get out of the way.
“Those men with the bird,” Talal said. “They set the fire because the townspeople were helping you? Hiding you?”
Qora nodded warily. “It was punishment. A lesson. They love their ’Kent-kissing lessons.”
“And who are they?”
“Kettral.” She spat the word.
Talal frowned. “I didn’t recognize them, and I trained on these islands for almost a decade.” He glanced over at Gwenna, then Annick.
“Nope,” Gwenna replied.
The sniper just shook her head.
“They’re calling themselves Kettral, anyway,” Qora went on. “No better than us, really. Just Jakob Rallen’s thugs.”
“Rallen?” Gwenna asked, confusion getting the better of her.
Qora nodded grimly. “He’s in charge now.”
It made less than no sense. Jakob Rallen had been Master of Cadets for better than ten years, but no one had taken him much more seriously than the chair he sat in.
“In charge of what?” Gwenna asked.
“The Eyrie. He still calls it that, but really it’s just his own personal racket now-raising yellowbloom over on Qarsh, using the birds to get it to market overseas, selling it for a massive profit, using the money to buy whatever he needs to cement his position here. He calls it the Eyrie, but it’s just a yellowbloom operation.”
Jak nodded. “Rallen styles himself a commander of the Eyrie, but he’s just the one in charge of running the drug.”
Gwenna spat into the water. “That useless bastard couldn’t run a bonfire if the wood was already piled and someone else lit the match.”
“Yeah, well, he’s burned plenty,” Qora replied. “As you saw last night. And not just buildings. He’s tied people to poles, doused them with oil, and lit them ablaze. He’s a vicious son of a bitch, and he’s in charge.”
“And you’re the resistance,” Talal concluded.
Qora hesitated, then nodded warily.
Gwenna glanced over at Jak. His broad shoulders were slumped, but he was watching her and seemed a good sight more cooperative than Qora.
“Where are the rest of you?” Gwenna asked.
He opened his mouth, but Qora cut him off before he could respond.
“Not a chance,” she said, shaking her head.
“They saved us, Qora,” Jak observed quietly. The man was obviously strong-he had the chest and shoulders of a serious swimmer, which was saying something on an archipelago where everyone could swim a mile or two before breakfast-but his voice was soft, deferential. If Gwenna closed her eyes, she could imagine a slender boy talking rather than a man grown. “Our plan went all wrong,” he continued, “and they showed up to save us.”
“Yeah, but showed up from where?” Qora stabbed an accusatory finger at Gwenna. “They already admitted they’re Kettral.”
“When we left the Islands,” Gwenna replied grimly, “being Kettral wasn’t something people tried to hide.”
“Left the Islands to go where?” Qora demanded. “On what bird? On what orders? For all we know, you’re working with Rallen.”
Gwenna stared. “Would we be hip-deep in a mangrove swamp right now if we were working for Jakob fucking Rallen? If Rallen sent us to capture you, we would have captured you and brought you back to Rallen.”
“Unless he sent you to spy.”
Gwenna bit down on her retort. The woman was paranoid, but then, months living out of cellars and caves, of glancing up each time a hawk-shaped shadow slid across the sky … that would make a person twitchy.
“I killed three of those bastards back there,” she said, keeping her voice level. She glanced over at the sniper. “How about you, Annick?”
“Three.”
“Talal?”
“One,” the leach replied. He nodded toward Jak. “I spent most of my time carrying him.”
“Seven,” Gwenna said, holding up her fingers, hoping the sight of something fleshy, something solid would finally reassure the woman. “If we were working with Rallen, would we kill seven of our friends?”
Qora watched her, worrying the bloody cuticle of her thumb with one insistent fingernail, lips pressed tightly together. For a moment, Gwenna thought she was about to crack, to talk, then she grimaced and shook her head.
“What did you say you were doing here?” she demanded.
“Sightseeing,” Gwenna replied grimly. She glanced over at Jak. He seemed like he wanted to talk, but was taking his cues from Qora. It was tempting to seize them both by the necks, smash their skulls together a dozen times, rinse off the blood, ask the questions again, repeat as necessary. She could get answers that way, no doubt about it. Trouble was-they were likely to be pretty shitty answers.
Gwenna blew out a long, irritated breath.
“All right, look. You don’t know who we are-I understand. You want to keep your friends safe-I respect that. Why don’t you tell us about Rallen instead. How’d he get to be in charge? Why do those assholes follow him?”
Silence from Qora and Jak. The light slap of waves sloshing against the mangrove trunks. The shift and rustle of leaves, perfume of the small white flowers, heavy with their impending death.
“Look,” Gwenna said, “I’m working on my attitude, and so I’ve been friendly so far.…”
She let the syllable hang. Then, to her shock, Annick spoke into the stretching silence. “These two are insurgents,” the sniper said without looking over. “If Rallen is the ranking Kettral on the Islands, he is in charge, according to the Code. Any resistance offered by Qora and Jak is treason. They are traitors, as are any allies they might have.”
Gwenna turned to stare at the sniper. All morning she’d been trying to convince these two idiots that she had nothing to do with Jakob Rallen, that she was on their side, only to have Annick start rattling off passages from the ’Kent-kissing Code?
“Annick-” she began, but Qora got there first, rounding on the sniper, fury overmatching whatever fear she felt.
“Rallen came for us, you miserable bitch! We had no idea what had even happened at the Eyrie until he showed up, hawking his ’Shael-spawned second chance!”
Gwenna choked back her own objections, stilled her face, and settled back against the trunk. She stole a glance at Annick. The sniper was still staring out toward the ocean, an arrow nocked to her undrawn bow. She didn’t say anything more, didn’t even turn. If she knew what she had done, she didn’t show it. Her words, though, that flat endorsement of Jakob Rallen, had rattled free a portion of the truth. The question now was whether to keep rattling, or to wait.
“Second chance?” Talal asked finally.
And then the understanding hit Gwenna like a slap upside the head. Suddenly she knew why she recognized Jak. “You’re from Arim,” she said. “Holy Hull, you’re the washouts.” From that point, it was easy to follow the logic’s flight. “That’s why you know how to fight, but you’re shit at it.”
“We’re doing what we can,” Jak said quietly.
“Quick Jak,” Talal said slowly, looking at the man with new eyes. “Laith used to talk about you all the time. You’re what, five classes older than us? Laith said you were the best flier on the Islands.”
Jak grimaced. “You have to pass the Trial if you want to keep flying birds.”
“And you washed out,” Gwenna concluded. “We were too young to hear the details, but I remember the rumor-Quick Jak didn’t make it. The Kettral’s best flier wasn’t going to be Kettral after all. I always thought you died.”
The man laughed, a short, mirthless sound, like he’d been punched in the gut. “I’m alive, all right. I even made it through the first week of the Trial. But when we came to the Hole, when I saw those blind white creatures, I just … couldn’t.”
Like last night, Gwenna thought grimly, when you froze in the alleyway. When the shit got thick and you left your partner to die. This was the resistance, a group of men and women who had fizzled out at some point during their training, who had been kicked down enough times that they finally quit, skulking off to Arim to live out their lives in comfortable captivity. These were her new allies, her only allies.
“So while the Eyrie was destroying itself,” Talal said quietly, “no one thought to come for you?”
“Why would they?” Qora demanded bitterly. “A few hundred washouts? The Kettral were focused on killing Kettral. We could see the birds fighting in the sky, could see the boats burning, but we don’t have boats or birds over on Arim. We’re not allowed them.”
Annick nodded without looking over. “Makes sense. The whole island-all Arim-was a no-value target.”
Qora nodded. “We were almost as irrelevant as the rotting town of rum-soaked thieves over on Hook.”
“And so when it was all over,” Gwenna concluded, “you were left.”
She could see the guilt scribbled across both their faces. Quick Jak dropped his eyes, but Qora nodded again.
“Rallen was left, too,” she said. The defiance had gone out of her voice.
“And for the same reason,” Gwenna added. “When the shit hit, no one was worried about that useless sack of suet. I’d be more concerned about gull shit on my shirt than Jakob Rallen hoisting himself out of his chair to fight me.”
“He’s dangerous,” Jak said, shaking his head.
“Maybe if he falls on you.”
“Or shatters your face with a kenning,” Qora snapped.
Gwenna blinked. In all her years as a cadet, she’d never paused to consider Jakob Rallen’s weapons specialty. The idea that he’d ever been anything more than an overweening, power-hungry, third-rate trainer had seemed ludicrous. Even the Kettral made mistakes, and she’d always considered Rallen a perfect example. The thought that he’d once been deadly, that he was a leach …
She glanced over at Talal. “Did you know this?”
He shook his head slowly.
“How did you find out?” Gwenna demanded, turning back to Qora.
Qora, however, wasn’t listening. Her eyes were far away, fixed on some distant, indelible memory. “When it was all done, he came to Arim,” she said. “Claimed the Eyrie had been betrayed, betrayed from the inside. Said there would be a second chance for those of us who still wanted to serve.…”
When she fell silent, Jak took up the story.
“We had no idea what he was planning. All we knew was that he was Kettral, high-up Kettral, and here he was, telling us we could try again, could have one more opportunity to redeem ourselves. Everyone flinches, he said. This is a chance to make it right.” He blew out an unsteady breath. “He told me I could fly again. None of us knew what he really wanted.”
“And what,” Talal asked quietly, “does he really want?”
“Power,” Qora spat. “His own little kingdom way out here in the middle of the ocean. At first it was all just drilling and training, new uniforms and new blades, burying the fallen and swearing oaths. We thought we were Kettral, thought we were fighting for the empire, thought we were finally doing what we’d trained all those years to do.” She broke off, her mouth twisting into something like a sick, broken smile. “We were such fools. Such fucking fools. Took months before we realized we were just the thugs of some petty warlord who was setting up his fiefdom, the whole thing propped up on his yellowbloom crop.”
Gwenna shook her head. “And when you did finally realize it, none of you thought to just slide a knife into his gullet?”
“We tried,” Qora said, the two syllables grinding against each other.
“Evidently you didn’t try very hard. That shit-licker can barely hoist himself out of a chair. He walks with a ’Kent-kissing cane. You could kill him with a brick and not break a sweat.”
“You don’t understand,” Jak said. “By that point he had the Black Guard.”
Gwenna shook her head. “The Black Guard?”
“Others like us. From Arim. For the first few months Rallen was watching us, testing us, figuring out who was really loyal to the empire, and who just wanted to get in on some killing. By the time we realized what was happening, he had a whole crew, five Wings loyal just to him. They had the birds. They controlled the armory.”
“And you didn’t fight them?”
Qora stared at her. “You ever try to fight a kettral from the ground? Standing on your own two feet?”
It was a sobering thought. Gwenna had spent her life around the birds, learning to fly them, to ride them, to trust them, and yet she’d never really grown accustomed to those huge dark eyes, the indifferent stare. Laith had claimed the creatures were never domesticated, just tamed, and even tame seemed like a stretch when you watched one rend a cow or a sheep to ribbons. Kettral-trained fighters were the best in the world, but a large part of what made them so deadly was the birds themselves. Fighting against a trained Wing in flight … it was a half step from madness.
“So,” Gwenna said, trying to turn the conversation back to the current situation, “Rallen seized control. He has half of the wash-of the inhabitants of Arim fighting for him, while the rest of you are holed up somewhere.”
“Those of us who are left,” Qora replied. “Rallen put together his Black Guard, then demanded an oath of obedience.”
“Kettral swear to obey and serve the empire,” Annick observed.
“Not anymore,” Qora spat. “Rallen’s oath is to him, personally, as Supreme Commander of the Eyrie.”
Gwenna shook her head. “What horseshit.”
“Of course it’s horseshit! That’s why some of us refused. We just didn’t realize he expected us to refuse, that he was ready for it. The oath wasn’t just an oath, it was a test-a way to sort us, to winnow out anyone who might oppose him. The slaughter started almost as soon as he tallied up our names.” She covered her eyes with a hand. “Only a few of us escaped.”
Gwenna nodded slowly. It was hardly a subtle trap, but no less effective for that.
“Did any of you try to get free of the Islands altogether?” Talal asked.
Qora spread her hands. “How? We were never permitted ships on Arim. And if we managed to steal one, what then? Rallen has the birds. He has the munitions. The Black Guard could sink a ship from the air without ever coming close.”
Just like the Widow’s Wish. It had taken just a few hundred heartbeats from the first assault until the vessel slid beneath the waves.
“So you’re fighting him.”
“Trying. Failing, mostly. It’s just about all we can do to stay hidden.”
“I’m surprised you’ve managed it this long. There aren’t that many islands, and they aren’t that big.”
Qora hesitated, then glanced over at Jak.
“Just tell them,” the flier said after a long pause. He was staring down at his hands, strong hands by the look of them, but empty, fingers opening and closing as though hoping for a weapon, as though baffled at the lack of anything to grasp. “We’re already losing. Maybe they can help.”
“And if they’re with Rallen?” Qora asked, voice tight.
“Then we’ll get this whole ’Kent-kissing thing over with that much quicker.”
Qora turned back to Gwenna, jaw clenched as though she’d nailed it shut. It took her a long time to speak, and when she did, her voice was rough and grudging as rust.
“We’re not on the Islands. We’re under them.”