Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Valyn took a deep breath, then turned back to the scene at hand. The first soldier was bent double, straining to haul breath through his shattered windpipe as he clawed at the dirt with one hand. The man trapped beneath the horse lay still, but it was clear from the awkward angle of his body that his leg was broken. A heavy horrible stone settled in Valyn’s gut. In just heartbeats his neat ambush had spiraled utterly out of control. The men down weren’t traitors or barbarians; they were Annurians, soldiers of his own empire, loyal troops following orders as best as they were able, and for that loyalty Valyn had attacked them, crippled at least one for life, and possibly killed another.

“Is he alert?” Valyn asked roughly, turning to Laith. The flier had the fourth soldier pinned to the earth, a knee in the small of his back.

“For now,” he replied, lacing the man’s wrists with a length of light cord. He glanced over his shoulder at the surrounding violence. His eyes showed bleak in the moonlight. “Holy Hull. What did we do?”

“We did what we had to,” Valyn replied, trying to shackle his own nausea and horror.

“Had to?” Laith demanded, gesturing at the bodies with a hand. “How did we have to do this?”

“It’s done, Laith,” Talal said quietly, rejoining the two of them. “It went wrong, but we all did it, and we can’t take it back.”

“What about him?” Valyn asked, nodding toward the soldier up the road. Talal had slit the horse’s throat, and both beast and man lay still.

The leach shook his head. “The fall snapped his neck.”

Valyn stared at the shadowy forms of man and horse, then turned his back on them, crossing instead to the soldier with the injured windpipe. The Annurian knelt on his hands and knees, hacking out a shattered sound, half cough, half retch, his body quivering in the still air. For a moment, Valyn could do nothing but watch. Between the moon’s light and his own eyes, he could see everything, even the details-the small tattoo of a mouse behind the soldier’s ear, the scarring across his right knuckles, the uneven patch where someone had hacked away too much hair with a belt knife. The man had managed to crawl maybe a dozen paces, no goal beyond escaping his own terror.

“Crushed,” Talal said, joining him.

“Maybe not,” Valyn replied.

“It’s crushed,” the leach said again, quietly but firmly.

“Someone could treat it. Remember Vellik back on the Islands? He busted his throat in a botched barrel drop, and it healed up all right.”

“They got Vellik into the infirmary in less than an hour, and even still, he can barely talk now. I know how to patch up a lot of things, but this…” He spread his hands. “It’s just a question of fast or slow.”

The man finally turned his head at the sound of their voices. He was young, maybe a year or two older than Valyn. He raised a weak hand in a gesture that might have been pleading or accusation, his jaw working around the mangled wreckage of his words.

Valyn blew out a long, uneven breath. Talal was right. The only kindness now was the knife’s kindness, and yet Valyn hesitated, feeling for the first time what it meant to command the Wing. With all the swimming and language study, flight training and demolitions work back on the Islands, it was easy sometimes to forget that this was what he had trained his whole life to do. Kettral was just a polite word for killer . Of course, he wasn’t supposed to be killing Annurian soldiers, but then, killing was killing. No one wanted to die.

Valyn forced himself to look at the wounded soldier; the least he could do was meet his eyes. The legionary held the stare. What did he see, looking into the darkness of Valyn’s vacant irises? Valyn read fear and pain, smelled the hot burn of terror on the air. Maybe the messenger had been following their conversation, maybe not, but one way or another, he knew that his death had arrived.

Which makes every heartbeat a cruelty, Valyn thought bleakly.

Then, before he could think further, he buried his knife in the soldier’s neck, ripping furiously through the windpipe and arteries, then tearing up through the muscle until the blade snagged on bone. Hot blood soaked his blacks, and Valyn’s own breath came hot and ragged in his throat. The soldier sagged against him, head canting off at an obscene angle, eyes blank, mouth hanging open.

“Holy Hull, Val,” Laith muttered. “You didn’t need to take his whole head off.”

Valyn stared at the body for a moment, then jerked his knife free. The corpse collapsed.

“He’s fucking dead, isn’t he?” he demanded, knuckles white with clutching the blade. “Let’s see what the other two have to say. Let’s see if all this was worth anything.”

Morjeta’s personal chambers comprised a suite of breezy, high-ceilinged marble rooms with tall narrow windows three times Kaden’s height, where gossamer curtains fluttered with the breeze. After gesturing them in, the leina shut the heavy wooden door behind her, turned a key in the lock, then crossed to the windows, brushing aside the curtains, leaning far enough out to see the stonework on either side.

“Can we-” Triste began, but her mother cut her off with a tense shake of the head, waving them ahead into yet another room, this one away from the windows. A wide bed draped with fine silk stood against one wall. A pair of long, upholstered divans faced it across a rich, thickly piled rug. The leina shut the door behind them, slid a pair of locks into place, put her ear to the wood for several heartbeats, then finally turned.

“Please,” she said, gesturing to the divans, “be seated. I apologize for my haste in leading you here, but sometimes it seems Ciena loves secrets as much as she loves pleasure.”

“Can we talk in this room?” Triste asked.

Morjeta nodded. “There are listening holes in the other chambers, but I’ve found them here. Plugged them.”

She turned from her daughter to Kaden and Kiel, her gaze more forthright than it had been in the garden pavilion. If that look were calibrated to put Kaden at his ease, it failed. He felt like a goat sized up before the slaughter, and had to keep himself from tugging his hood even farther over his head.

“Of course,” Morjeta continued, “there are already at least a dozen people who know you’re here.” She ticked them off on a manicured finger. “The guards outside Relli’s shop, Relli herself, Yamara, who greeted you, and any of the other women or men we passed on the way here. How crucial is your secrecy? Like the scent of lilac on the spring air, word is already wafting through the temple halls.”

Kaden hesitated, then pushed back his hood. “Important,” he said.

The leina ’s eyes widened as she saw his burning irises, and her lips pursed. “Oh,” she said, staring for a moment before rising from her seat and dropping into a low curtsy. “Be welcome in Ciena’s innermost heart, Your Radiance.”

“Rise,” Kaden replied, gesturing, “rise.” Again he felt the weight of that single syllable, one he’d be forced to utter the rest of his life. Provided, he amended silently, that I have a life ahead of me . “I hope, someday, to sit the throne of my ancestors, but I expect someone else has beaten me to it. For now, please call me Kaden. Any further ceremony is only likely to get us all killed.”

Morjeta paused, then nodded as she rose. “As you say, Kaden.” She hesitated. “If I may ask, how-”

“It was a trap,” Triste burst out. “Tarik Adiv took me to Ashk’lan.…”

“As a gift,” her mother said, grief clouding her eyes. “I have not forgiven myself.”