The Providence of Fire

13

Night saved them, night and the heavy clouds that obscured their flight as they clutched the bird’s talons, rising free of the shattered city, then from the canyon itself, rising, rising, with what felt like agonizing slowness, until they were clear of the highest peaks, buried in darkness and cloud. Valyn had no idea whether Suant’ra had killed the Flea’s bird, no idea if Chi Hoai Mi was alive, or if the Flea himself was following. That fear kept him awake through the first part of the escape. The fear and the pain.

As the night wore on, however, as ’Ra winged unevenly westward through the achingly cold night, it was all he could do to stay conscious in his harness, to brace himself against the buffeting gusts of the bird’s massive wings, to keep his numb fingers wrapped around the strap overhead. He couldn’t draw a bow, not with the quarrel buried in his shoulder, could barely even hold himself upright, and yet he was faring better than both Gwenna and Talal.

Gwenna slumped unconscious in her harness, having succumbed to her vicious head wound as soon as they were in the air. Annick had lashed her to ’Ra’s talon with a length of rope, which kept her from spinning free in the wind, but the slackness of her jaw and the way her eyes rolled back in her head had Valyn worried.

Talal was faring a bit better. An arrow had punched into his leg during the chaos of the grab, and though he was managing to stand on the far talon, Valyn could tell from the angle of the shaft that the steel head was buried close to the bone. Getting it out would prove both dangerous and time-consuming, and, in a best case, the wound would slow the leach.

Most worrisome of all, at least at the moment, was the fact that ’Ra herself was struggling, the normally effortless beating of her wings irregular and labored, her great body listing to port. Valyn had read about fights between wild kettral, but, aside from a few harmless skirmishes between hatchlings, he’d never witnessed one. How ’Ra could fly at all after trading blows with the Flea’s bird Valyn had no idea, but fly she did, albeit weakly. He couldn’t even guess where Sami Yurl’s bird had ended up in the chaos.

We’re alive, Valyn reminded himself. We got out.

At least, he hoped they had. There had been no sign of the Flea’s Wing since Assare. It was possible, more than possible, that Chi Hoai was dead, her kettral was crippled, and the rest of the Wing was stranded. On the other hand, the two birds hadn’t been out of sight for that long, not long enough to be certain of anything, and trusting to someone else’s failure made for shit strategy. And so, for hour after hour he stared east, vision blurred by his wind-whipped tears, searching in the stacked columns of cloud for some sign of pursuit. His eyes ached, but at least the effort took his mind off his own pain. Nerve-fraying as it was, staring into the empty darkness was better than looking at Gwenna’s limp form.

He’d managed to do his job-Kaden was clear, Valyn’s own Wing was alive-and yet all he felt, aside from the wracking pain in his shoulder, was a sick slosh of guilt and anger. Guilt for the injuries to Gwenna and Talal; anger at Pyrre for starting the fight and at himself for not stopping it; and yet more guilt for Blackfeather Finn.

They might be part of the plot, he reminded himself. They could have been keeping us alive for questioning, for torture. It was possible, but the possibility didn’t change the fact that a man Valyn had liked and admired was dead.

An hour out, he called a short stop. He hated to do it. Landing turned them into a grounded, stationary target, but they needed Laith on top of the bird, not strapped in beneath, they needed to regain something like a fighting configuration, and Valyn wanted at least a few moments to look over Talal’s wound and Gwenna’s.

“I’m fine,” the leach said, grimacing as he straightened his knee. “I’m not going to die of a leg wound.”

In fact, there were plenty of ways to die of a leg wound-the Eyrie medical archives were packed with them-but Valyn wasn’t going to press the point. If the leach could stand, he could fly, and for the moment, flight was imperative.

Gwenna’s case was more troubling. Valyn refused to light a lantern, but her normally pale skin looked even paler, ashen to his night eyes, and though she winced and cried out when he searched through the tangled mess of her hair for the wound, she didn’t wake up. Blood had soaked into her curls, then frozen, and after a moment he hacked away several handfuls with his belt knife. She’d probably curse him for the decision when she woke, but waking was a prerequisite to the cursing. Her skull felt intact, though his fingers were too numb to be certain, and regardless, it was easy enough to wreck the brain without damaging the skull. In the end, all he could do was wrap her in a heavy blanket to keep off the worst of the chill, then strap her to the talon once more.

The rest of the flight was cold, long, and miserable. Laith hugged the valleys and passes, trying to keep them low enough that the ridgelines would hide them from pursuit, but not so low that they all got dead. The flier knew his business, but it was dark and they were belly-to-the-dirt. Valyn could see the cracks in the boulders, the small caches of snow secreted beneath the stones. A single mistake from Laith would leave them all smeared across the side of some granite cliff.

By the time they crested the final ridgeline, Valyn was nauseated from the pain in his shoulder, from peering endlessly into the darkness, from feeling his muscles clench every time they scraped over some jagged escarpment. It didn’t help that light was starting to soak the eastern sky. In an hour the sun would be up, and then they would really have problems. The Kettral worshipped Hull for good reason: even wounded, even fleeing, Valyn’s Wing had a chance as long as it stayed dark. With the arrival of dawn, however, they’d be visible from the ground and the air both. If the Flea could fly, if he had guessed their direction of travel, if he, too, had been pushing west through the night, he’d be able to spot them from twenty miles off. Farther, if he used a long lens. It was a lot of “ifs,” but then, the Flea had made a career out of turning “ifs” into “whens.”

Valyn scanned the grasslands unfolding below. Though the Kettral had flown plenty of missions north of the White River, especially in recent years, striking at various Urghul bands, most of the action happened nearly a thousand miles to the west, in the Blood Steppe and the Golden Steppe, where the nomadic tribes butted up against the boundary of the Annurian Empire. The vast, undifferentiated swath of land below, empty grasslands flowing into the jutting teeth of the Bone Mountains, was marked “Far Steppe” on the Eyrie maps, but Valyn couldn’t remember much more about it. There were tribes this far east, but the Kettral trainers dismissed them as irrelevant-an omission Valyn regretted now. He was going to have to land-that much was clear. Gwenna and Talal required serious attention, and the bolt in his own shoulder would have to come out. Just as crucially, ’Ra needed to rest before she dropped out of the sky.

Pyrre prodded him in the shoulder, breaking his concentration.

He turned to face the woman. That she had survived the fight in Assare, the fight she had started, seemed grossly unfair, but then, there were no judges in battle, no one to adjudicate the dispute and keep everyone between the lines. Valyn had no idea what to do with her when they were finally clear of the mountains. He was tempted to simply leave her on the ’Kent-kissing steppe, but that was a decision that could wait.

She prodded him again, and he swallowed a curse.

“What?” he shouted, leaning so close to the assassin that her hair whipped at his face. If she was frightened to be flying a wounded bird above dangerous territory while pursued by a Kettral Wing, she didn’t show it, didn’t smell it. Valyn had yet to see the woman really scared.

“Fire,” she mouthed, pointing off to the northwest.

He followed her finger. They were still too far off to make out more than a dull orange smudge, but the flame wasn’t large, probably a cook fire kindled in the predawn. Which meant Urghul. Valyn tightened his grip on the strap, leaning out into the dark for a better view. His trainers might have skipped an analysis of the eastern tribes, but he’d learned enough about the nomadic horsemen to be wary.

Unlike the other polities surrounding Annur-the Manjari Empire, Anthera, Freeport, and the Federated Cities-the Urghul had no government, which meant no law, no significant trade, and no respite from the constant blood feuds, vicious intertribal vendettas lasting dozens of years at a time. Evidently, it was all a part of their worship of the Lord of Pain. The Annurians knew the god as Meshkent, but the Urghul had a different name, one in their own language: Kwihna, they called him, the Hardener. There were no cities on the steppe, but over the millennia the Urghul had erected hundreds of altars to their god, some massive stone tablets, others little more than piled cairns where they carried out their savage worship of pain and blood sacrifice.

Valyn tried to remember the occasions for such sacrifice: the full moon, the new moon, solstices and storms, floods and famines, all requiring breathing bodies to offer up to the god. Gent had demanded to know how there were any of the bastards left after so much blood and burnt offering, but according to Daveen Shaleel, there were more Urghul than most people realized-maybe a million in small tribes, taamu, they called them, scattered across the enormous grasslands. Valyn always found that number unsettling. Although the population of the empire itself ran into the tens of millions, the legions rarely fielded more than half a million soldiers, and those were spread all over the border. The Urghul, on the other hand, had no dedicated military; every man, woman, and child was a fighter. Consummate horsemen, physically and mentally toughened by a hard life in a hard place, well-blooded through constant conflict, they could pose a serious threat to Annur, if they ever stopped fighting amongst themselves.

More to the point, they posed a serious threat to Valyn’s Wing. Cadets weren’t kept formally apprised of Kettral missions, but there was always buzz in the training yard and the mess hall, enough that Valyn knew the Eyrie had been flying missions over the steppe nearly every month for the past several years. Who the target was, or why an empty chunk of grassland without cities or towns was so important, he had no idea, but it hardly mattered now. The Urghul immediately below might not have encountered Kettral, but they would have heard tales of great birds dropping out of the sky bearing men and women dressed in black. The odds of a welcome parade were not high.

But still, he thought as he stared out over the land, all shifting grays and blacks beneath a cloud-wracked anvil of sky, We might have to go down there.

He considered the campfire once more. Gwenna’s head wound required rest. They all needed rest. The rations they’d stolen in their flight from the Eyrie were nearly gone. Both Talal’s injury and Valyn’s own needed to be cleaned and cauterized, which meant fire and yet more rest. It was possible to make their own camp, to go without food, to tend their own wounds and steer clear of the people below, but that choice presented its own risks. In the end ’Ra’s deteriorating wingbeat decided him.

The bird couldn’t stay in the air much longer. She was gliding in long sweeps, losing hundreds of feet of altitude as she rested, then struggling mightily to regain the lost elevation. The stutter in her wingbeat had grown worse, and she was flying head-down. Laith would have to look her over on the ground to discover what was wrong. Worse, a battered kettral could take days or weeks to recover. That campfire meant Urghul, and Urghul meant horses. Valyn hated riding, but it beat walking, if Gwenna even could walk.

He reached for the signaling strap, tugging out the relevant code: Circle target.

For a moment nothing happened, then he felt the bird bank slightly to the north, aiming directly at the campfire.

He leaned over to Talal, cupping a hand to his mouth. “How’s your Urghul?”

The leach grimaced, though whether at the question or the pain in his leg, Valyn couldn’t say. “Awful,” he replied.

“Can you tell them we don’t want a fight?”

“I don’t think Don’t want a fight is an Urghul concept.”

“How about, If you move, the bird will rip your throat out?”

Talal frowned. “Bird kill you is about the best I can do.”

“Bird kill you it is.”

“Are you certain about this, Valyn?” the leach asked.

“No.” It had been a very long time since Valyn felt certain about anything.

He turned back to the flame. As they grew closer, his spirits rose. There was only a single fire with a few small figures gathered around it. Two api, the collapsible hide tents favored by the Urghul, stood a little way off, with a line of hobbled horses between them. The camp probably contained about ten people. No more than a dozen. Even injured, a Kettral Wing would be equal to ten or twelve nomadic savages.

“I’ve got no ’Kent-kissing certainty whatsoever,” he went on. “But we need food and fire, rest and horses-and they’re all right there.”

* * *

All in all, the drop went better than Valyn had dared to hope. The Urghul tending the campfire were just kids-the oldest maybe ten years old-preparing the morning meal while their elders enjoyed a few final moments of sleep and warmth inside the api. The oldest girl, a pale, blond child of nine or ten, hurled herself at them, screaming imprecations in her strange language and stabbing with her cooking knife until Laith knocked her unconscious with a carefully calibrated blow of his sword hilt. The two younger children glanced uncertainly from the massive bird to the api and back, but, aside from shouting a few vicious-sounding threats, they made no move to interfere.

The adults were a different story. As soon as the children stopped shrieking, a man barreled out of the entrance flap of the nearest tent, stark naked save for the spear in his hand, face twisted with confusion and rage. The sight of Suant’ra looming over his cook fire slowed him for a moment, but if he was frightened by six well-armed, black-clad figures materializing out of the predawn murk, he didn’t show it. With a bellow, he hurled the spear directly at Valyn. Valyn slid aside, letting the shaft glide harmlessly into the night, but then, before he could take a step forward, a knife sprouted from his assailant’s throat.

Valyn glanced over his shoulder at Pyrre.

The Skullsworn smiled at him, then winked.

“We’re not here to kill them,” he spat.

“Please stop using the first-person plural,” she replied, bouncing another knife on her palm. “I’m not a part of your Wing.”

“I am on the Wing,” Laith interjected, “and I’m all right with killing them. I remember those lectures on blood sacrifice and pain ritual, and I’m not all that eager-”

He broke off as a woman burst from the api, naked as the first man, a shorthorn bow in her hand. Her skin, like that of all the Urghul, was onion-pale, almost lambent in the firelight, and her hair, too, a great blond mane, might have been spun from white-hot fire. She took a step forward, then paused, eyeing the assembled Kettral. A chill, vicious wind sliced through the camp. She didn’t shiver.

“Go ahead and say it,” Pyrre remarked. “She’s a woman. And we don’t kill women. I don’t mind. Tell me how helpless she is.”

Valyn stared at the Urghul. Scars puckered the skin of her belly and legs-lance wounds and arrow punctures. Her hair whipped at her face, but she paid it no mind, focusing instead on Valyn. She hadn’t yet drawn the bow, but an arrow was nocked to the string, and, from the easy way she held it, he imagined she was familiar with the weapon.

“If she moves,” he said slowly, “kill her.”

“How barbaric,” Pyrre replied, amusement bright in her voice. “Triste would never have approved, poor girl.”

Valyn ignored her. “Talal, start talking. Quick.”

The leach hesitated a moment, then began haltingly: “Wasape ebibitu-”

“You killed my wasape,” the woman said, cutting him off, indicating the sprawled corpse with her chin. “Do not savage my language.”

That she spoke the Annurian tongue was something of a surprise, but it meant Valyn could handle the negotiation himself. As the woman spoke, other figures had emerged from the two api, some wearing leather riding breeches and rough tunics, others bare-chested. As Valyn had hoped, they numbered just half a dozen. Ten with the kids and the dead man.

“He attacked us,” Valyn said, indicating the corpse. “We killed him only in defense.”

The woman considered the body for a moment, then shrugged. “There are other warriors to warm my nights.”

To her right, a young man growled something incomprehensible. He had a knife in each hand, and from the way he was crouched forward, looked eager to try his luck.

“Annick…” Valyn began.

“I’ve got him,” she replied.

The Urghul woman looked at the sniper, then turned to her companion, uttering a few curt words.

He snapped something angry in response, waved a knife at the Kettral, then spit full in her face.

Without blinking, the naked woman pivoted, slamming her arrowhead through his throat. She held it there firmly as the dying man dropped his knives, clutched at the wooden shaft, then released it as he crumpled. She considered the body for a moment, then turned to the other Urghul. Valyn caught the words for chief, dead, and challenge. She spread her arms wide as if inviting attack from her own people, evidently indifferent to her own nakedness, the biting wind, and the Kettral Wing a few paces away. Only when the other Urghul had nodded did she turn back to Valyn.

“I am Huutsuu,” she said. “Wohkowi of this family. Do we fight or do we eat?”

“I think I’m in love,” Pyrre said appreciatively. “I hope I don’t have to kill her.”

Valyn stared at the Urghul. If the lack of guards, the motley weapons, or the two newly dead men on the grass were anything to go by, they were hardly masters of military tactics. On the other hand, the woman showed no fear of her own death, nor any remorse over the bodies before her. She waited, arms spread, for his response.

“We eat,” Valyn said finally. “I regret your … men.”

Huutsuu shrugged. “Men would have killed you. These two…” She waved the bow in their direction. “Fools.”

“Nonetheless,” Valyn said, uncertain how to proceed in the absence of any sort of grief or anger, “we would avoid fighting.”

“Then we eat.” She turned to the children, both of whom were still glaring at Valyn. “Peekwi. Sari. Slap your sister awake and put the pot on the fire. I need my furs.” She turned, ducking back into the api without a word, and abruptly Valyn found himself standing in the center of an Urghul camp in which people went about their early morning routine-pissing behind the api, checking horses, rubbing chilled hands by the fire-as though nothing amiss had occurred, as though half a dozen soldiers hadn’t just dropped out of the sky on a giant bird to murder one of their number. Even the pair disposing of the bodies appeared indifferent to the manner of their death, bickering incomprehensibly as they stripped the few ornaments, tossed aside the weapons, and hauled the corpses into the high grass.

“This makes me nervous,” Talal murmured.

Valyn nodded. “Annick, keep your bow handy.”

“Maybe we got lucky,” Laith said, vaulting off the back of the bird. “Nothing wrong with a little good luck every now and then.”

Valyn allowed himself a moment of hope, then crushed it. “Optimism kills soldiers,” he replied, quoting Hendran.

“Steel in the guts kills soldiers,” the flier countered. “Or steel in the leg,” he added, glancing significantly at Talal. “Or the shoulder.”

“We’re getting there,” Valyn growled. He hardly needed to be reminded of the searing pain of the flatbow bolt grating against his scapula. “Talal, Laith-gather their weapons.”

“I need to look over ’Ra,” Laith said. “Something is really wrong with her.”

“The Urghul first,” Valyn said. “Then we patch up our people. Then the bird. Annick, cover them. Pyrre…”

“Just a gentle but firm reminder,” she replied, “that I am not on your Wing.”

“How unfortunate. Do you think I could prevail upon you to watch a hostage or two?”

“I don’t know-I might kill them.”

“That,” Valyn replied, gritting his teeth, “would miss the point of taking hostages.” He scanned the group, picking two Urghul at random. “Him and her.” He turned to Talal. “Can you tell them-”

“I’ll tell them,” Huutsuu replied, stepping out through the flap to her api, a massive bison hide draped over her shoulders and belted around her waist. The thing made her look larger, but slower. Had Valyn not witnessed her stabbing a man in the neck moments ago, had he not seen the sinew shifting beneath her bare skin, he would have underestimated this woman. It was a good lesson.

Huutsuu gestured to the two Urghul Valyn had selected, barking something rough as she gestured to a patch of ground a little space off from the fire. They hesitated, anger and doubt scrawled across their faces, but they went.

“Tie them if you want,” she said, crossing to the fire without a second glance, prodding with her finger at something in the large pot.

Valyn took a deep breath, surveying the scene. Everything appeared under control. Talal and Laith had made a large pile of bows, knives, and spears; Annick stood a short way off, scanning the camp, bow in hand.

Pyrre caught him watching her and smiled a wide, open smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My god accepts all sacrifice, but I’ve always felt that the unarmed make for meager offerings.”

She knelt behind the two hostages, trussing them quickly with the length of cord Talal had tossed her. It looked safe. If the Urghul were going to fight, they would have done it already, when they still had their weapons and full numbers.

“I apologize for this measure,” Valyn said, gesturing toward the tied Urghul.

Huutsuu shrugged once more. “It is a while since we were Hardened. Kwihna will be pleased.”

Valyn shook his head. “Hardened?”

She nodded. “Through pain.”

“No,” Valyn said. “We’re not here to harden you.”

“Less ethnography, Val,” Laith cut in. “More medicine.”

Valyn waved him down. “We’re here because we have wounds that need cleaning and cauterizing. We need food, and maybe horses as well.”

Something dangerous flashed in Huutsuu’s eyes. “No horses.”

Valyn started to point out that the woman wasn’t in a position to contest the point, then thought better of it. For all their success thus far, the situation had him edgy. Between his own pain, worry for his soldiers, wariness regarding the Urghul, and fear that the Flea would drop out of the sky, he felt like a flatbow cranked a turn too far, the whole apparatus so tight that a touch could snap the string or shatter the bow’s arc.

The injured first, he reminded himself. Then the bird. Then food.

Talal’s wound was straightforward enough, or it would have been if the clouds hadn’t opened up, pelting them with a vicious rain while lightning lashed the steppe a dozen miles distant. Valyn considered moving his Wing into the api, but that would leave them blind to what was going on outside. He could split the group, but splitting a small force was a piss-poor idea, no matter how complacent the enemy appeared. Which left them all out in the rain, close enough to the hissing fire that the heat taunted without doing anything to warm him. At least the sudden squall would limit the Flea’s visibility, if the bastard was even up there.

Valyn tried to force aside his worries and focus on Talal’s injury. He wiped his forehead, blinking past the sheeting rain, then took hold of the arrow while Laith held the leach’s leg. The wet wood was slick in his hands, and each time he lost his grip he felt Talal’s body spasm beneath him, heard him groan through clenched teeth. Finally, his hands mired in blood, and rain, and mud, Valyn forced the arrow through, twisting it as best he could to avoid scraping the bone, bearing down viciously to get it out and over as quickly as possible. Talal growled low in his chest, straining against Laith’s grip, then went slack as the arrowhead burst out. He was panting, eyes wide, rain streaming down his face.

“You all right?” Valyn asked.

The leach expelled a long, shuddering breath between his teeth, then nodded. “Finish it.”

Valyn broke the shaft with one quick motion, then yanked the remainder of the arrow free as Talal bit off a curse.

Behind him, Huutsuu snorted. If the rain bothered her, she didn’t show it, leaning over the fire to get a better view of the injury. “You are warriors?” she asked.

Valyn nodded curtly, taking the heated knife from Laith’s hand, then pressing the glowing metal to the exit wound. Talal twisted sharply, then passed out. Valyn breathed out slowly. Unconsciousness would spare the leach the pain of the second cauterization and keep him still while Valyn attended to the entry point.

Huutsuu snorted again. “A warrior should face his pain.”

“He faced it well enough,” Valyn snapped. “We’ve been flying all night.”

“He fled,” the woman replied, waving a finger at the flier’s limp body. “Fled into the Softness.”

Valyn pressed the knife to the entry wound, counting to eight silently, then rounded on Huutsuu.

“We don’t want a fight,” he snapped, “but keep talking, and you’ll find out something about pain.”

The woman regarded the glowing knife with scorn. “This is a small thing,” she replied, “for one who is tsaani three times over.”

“What in ’Shael’s name is she talking about?” Valyn demanded of no one in particular.

“Children,” Talal murmured, rousing from his stupor. “She’s had three children.”

Valyn shook his head. He had no idea why that mattered. Between the driving rain and the pounding agony in his shoulder, all piled on the fatigue of a long night spent in the harness, he felt ready to snap.

“I don’t give a shit how many kids she’s got.” He pointed at Huutsuu with the blade, then gestured toward the tied Urghul. “Over there. With them. Now.”

She looked him up and down a long moment, then shook her head and stalked away.

The sky had gone from black to a grudging gray. The serrated line of the eastern peaks still hid the sun, but the clouds were starting to clear. They’d be hard-pressed to finish tending wounds before full daylight, and Valyn still wasn’t sure what he planned to do then.

“Laith,” he said, voice rough with urgency and weariness, “get this fucking thing out of my shoulder.”

The bolt came out more easily than Talal’s arrow, although Laith needed to make a pair of slices in the surrounding skin in order to free the small barbs on the quarrel’s tip. Aware of Huutsuu’s eyes upon him, Valyn clamped down on his pain, refusing to cry out even as he felt the muscles of his shoulder pull, then tear. The searing agony of the hot knife threatened to plunge him into unconsciousness, but he clenched his jaw and forced back the fog on the fringes of his vision.

“I’m good,” he said, when he trusted himself to open his mouth again. “I’m good. Go check on ’Ra. I can take care of Gwenna.”

The demolitions master was by far the most worrisome case. She still had not regained consciousness, and in the meager dawn light her face looked even worse than it had in the dark, pale and waxen, her red hair plastered flat to the skin by the rain. The wool blanket was rapidly soaking through, and she was shivering, lips dark in her pallid face. Valyn ran a finger along the inside of her hand, but there was no response, no grip or reflex. There wasn’t much to do with head wounds but wait and hope, which meant they were going to have to get her warm. Which meant going in the api. Sometimes there just wasn’t a good option on offer.

“Talal?” he asked, glancing over at the leach. “Any thoughts?”

Talal frowned.

“We’ve already moved her too much. It was a rough night, and with the two drops…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“Valyn,” Laith cut in, all trace of levity vanished from his voice.

Valyn turned, hand on his blade, half expecting to find the Flea facing him down. There was only Laith, though, Laith and the bird. Suant’ra had half extended her enormous wing for him, and Laith stood beneath it, hands above him, prodding the joint with both hands. His face was grim.

“What?” Valyn asked.

“Not good.” The flier took a deep breath, then blew it out. “There’s serious damage to her shoulder-probably a patagial tear.”

“Meaning what?”

Valyn had sat through the lectures on kettral anatomy, they all had, but it was the flier’s responsibility to care for the birds in the field, and some of the more specific terminology had slipped.

“Meaning she can’t fucking fly.”

“She flew us here,” he pointed out. “She flew all night long.”

“Which tells you something about how tough she is,” Laith snapped. “Most birds would have fallen out of the air. The damage is bad, and the long flight made it worse. The joint is swelling. By noon she probably won’t be able to get in the air at all.”

Valyn glanced up at the kettral’s head. She was watching Laith, her huge, dark eye swiveling in its socket to follow him as he ran his hands beneath her feathers. He’d often wondered about the kettral, about what they thought and understood. Did ’Ra know she was injured? Was she frightened? It was impossible to read anything in those dark eyes.

“How long for it to heal?” Valyn asked.

Laith shook his head. “Weeks. Months. Maybe never.”

“We don’t have weeks, let alone months,” Valyn said. “How many miles can she make each day like this?”

“You’re not listening to me, Valyn,” Laith said. “She can’t fly at all, certainly not with us hanging off of her.”

Valyn stared, the implications sinking in. Kettral training was all well and good, but it was the birds that made the warriors legendary. Without ’Ra they lost their mobility, the element of surprise, and a vicious fighter in the bargain. Without ’Ra, they were stranded on the ass end of the steppe with no good way to get back to Annur, or anywhere else, for that matter.

“We have to stay,” Laith was saying, “set up a camp here while we tend her, pray she gets better.”

“Bad idea,” Annick said. The sniper hadn’t taken her eyes off the Urghul prisoners, but she’d clearly been listening to the conversation. “Suant’ra is too easy to spot from the land or air. The Flea will come, or more Urghul.”

Valyn nodded slowly. “We can’t hide her, and we can’t fight them all.”

Laith stared, aghast. “So … what? You just want to leave her?”

Valyn glanced east. The sun was just topping the peaks, etching the snow and ice with fire.

“No,” he said finally. “I want her to leave us.”

Laith started to object, but he held up a hand. “You said she could still fly before the swelling gets too bad, at least a little bit. Send her south, back toward the Islands. All the birds know how to get home, right?”

“She won’t make it to the Islands,” Laith replied, fury and fear roughening his voice.

“She doesn’t have to,” Valyn said. “She just needs to get away from us. Fifty miles. Even twenty. Far enough that anyone who finds her doesn’t find us, too.”

“And what happens,” Laith demanded, “when someone finds her? When she can’t fly?”

Valyn took a deep breath. “She’s not a pet, Laith. She’s a soldier. The same as you. The same as me. She’ll do what we’d do: fight until she has to retreat, retreat until she can’t, then fight one more time.” He tried to soften his voice. “She saved us, Laith, but she can’t help us anymore. Not now. All she can do is get us caught or killed, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

Laith glared at him, mouth open but silent. To Valyn’s shock, there were tears in the flier’s eyes. For a few heartbeats, it seemed like he was going to keep arguing, to refuse, but finally he nodded, a quick jerk, like he hadn’t meant to make the motion.

“All right,” he said, voice hoarse. “All right. I just need to strip the harnesses. Give her the best chance I can.”

Valyn nodded. “I’ll help.”

“No,” Laith barked. Then, more quietly, “No. I’ll do it.”

It didn’t take long for him to remove ’Ra’s rigging-just a matter of a few knots and buckles, and she was clean. Even then, though, Laith didn’t let her fly, running his hands instead through the feathers over her throat, murmuring to her in syllables Valyn couldn’t understand. The bird remained statue-still, her head cocked at an angle as though listening to the flier. When Laith finally stepped back, she watched him for a moment, then lowered her head slowly, until it was level with the flier’s own. He put a hand on her beak, a curiously gentle gesture that covered the bloodstains from the earlier attack, smiled, then stepped back, gesturing to the sky.

“Get out of here,” he said. “You fought well, now get out of here.”

’Ra bowed her head once, then launched herself into the air with a shriek, great wings moving raggedly as she struggled to gain height. Valyn watched, stomach in a knot, as she turned south, disappearing over a low line of hills.

He turned back to Laith. “I’m sorry.”

The flier met his eyes, gaze hard beneath the tears. “I hope you’ve got a fucking plan.”

The plan, for the moment, was simple: rest. Gwenna still wasn’t awake, Talal looked like he might fall over at any moment, and Valyn himself felt like he’d been beaten with boards for the better part of a week. He felt vulnerable without the bird, stranded, almost naked, but he couldn’t see any other way. Without ’Ra they could wear bison hides over their blacks, and aside from their dark hair, dark skin-easy enough to cover with hats and hides-blend in with the horsemen. They wouldn’t fool other Urghul, of course, but no one looking from the air would see anything amiss. Even if the Flea wasn’t following, he’d been clear enough back in Assare that the Eyrie had sent multiple Wings after Valyn.

And so, along with Laith and Talal, Valyn spent the better part of the morning erasing all signs of Suant’ra and the predawn fight. They mounded stone over the bodies of the two Urghul, raked out the bird’s claw marks from the soft earth, and moved the prisoners into the larger of the two api. The movement kept Valyn’s muscles from knotting too badly, and helped him to avoid thinking, at least for the moment, about the challenges ahead.

They’d just about finished carrying Gwenna into the smaller tent when Annick spoke from the other side of the fire, her voice level as usual.

“Keep working. Don’t look up.”

Valyn suppressed the natural reaction, bending instead to throw a couple more logs on the cook fire.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Bird,” she said. “Approaching high and from the east.”

It took an effort of will for Valyn to keep his hands away from his knives and blades, to squat down by the fire to prod at the contents of the rough kettle, but Annick had the better angle. Of course, the Kettral on the bird would probably expect a small group of Urghul to look up as they passed, but anyone scanning with a long lens would see his face, his features. Better to keep his eyes down and pretend he didn’t notice.

“They’re past,” Annick said finally.

Valyn glanced up, shielding his face with his hand, following the shape of the retreating bird.

“They were too high for me to make out,” the sniper continued.

Valyn squinted. The bird was high, but he could see the pinions, the shading of the wings and tailfeathers, his eyes keen even in the full daylight. He let out a long, slow breath.

“The Flea,” he said. “It was the Flea.”