Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“Well, I’m tired of being surprised,” Valyn growled. He rolled onto his side to look at Kaden, and once again Kaden found himself trying to see his brother-the brother he had once known-beneath the scars and lacerations, behind those unnaturally black eyes. Valyn the child had been quick to smile, to laugh, but Valyn the soldier looked harried, haunted, hunted, as though he distrusted the very sky above him, doubted his own battered hand and the naked sword it held.

Kaden knew the outlines of the story, how Valyn, too, had been stalked by those who wanted to bring down the Malkeenian line. In some ways, Valyn had had it worse than Kaden himself. While the Aedolians had struck suddenly and brutally into the heart of Ashk’lan, the soldiers had been strangers to Kaden, and the sense of injustice, of betrayal, remained abstract. Valyn, on the other hand, had seen his closest friend murdered by his fellow soldiers. He’d watched as the military order to which he’d devoted his life failed him-failed him or betrayed him. Kaden still worried about the possibility that the Kettral command, the Eyrie itself, was somehow complicit in the plot. Valyn had reason enough to be tired and wary, and yet there was something else in that gaze, something that worried Kaden, a darkness deeper than suffering or sorrow.

“We wait here,” Valyn went on, “out of sight, until Annick, Talal, and Gwenna get back. If they don’t find any monks, living monks, we hump out the way we came in, and get back on the ’Kent-kissing bird.”

Kaden nodded. The tension from the walk in had lodged deep in his stomach, a tight knot of loss, and sorrow, and anger. He set about loosening it. He had insisted on coming back for the survivors, but it looked as though there were no survivors. The residual emotion was doing him no good; was, in fact, obscuring his judgment. As he tried to focus on his breath, however, the images of Akiil’s face, of Pater’s, of Scial Nin’s, kept floating into his mind, startling in their immediacy and detail. Somewhere down there, sprawled among those blasted buildings, lay everyone he knew, and everyone, aside from Rampuri Tan, who knew him.

Someone else, someone without the Shin training, might find relief in the knowledge that those faces would fade over time, that the memories would blur, the edges soften; but the monks had taught him not to forget. The memories of his slaughtered friends would remain forever vivid and immediate, the shape of their sprawled forms would remain, carved in all their awful detail. Which is why, he thought grimly, you have to unhitch the feeling from the fact . That skill, too, the Shin had taught him, as though to balance the other.

Behind him, soft cloth scuffed over stone. He turned to find Annick and Talal, the Wing’s sniper and leach, approaching, sliding over the wide slabs of rock on their bellies as though they’d been born to the motion. They pulled up just behind Valyn, the sniper immediately nocking an arrow to her bow, Talal just shaking his head.

“It’s bad,” he said quietly. “No prisoners.”

Kaden considered the leach silently. It had come as a surprise to discover that men and women who would have been burned alive or stoned to death for their unnatural abilities anywhere else in Annur served openly with the Kettral. All Kaden’s life he’d heard that leaches were dangerous and unstable, their minds warped by their strange powers. Like everyone else, he’d grown up on stories of leaches drinking blood, of leaches lying and stealing, of the horrifying leach-lords, the Atmani, who in their hubris shattered the very empire they had conspired to rule.

Another thing about which I know too little, Kaden reminded himself.

In the short, tense days since the slaughter and rescue, he had tried to talk with Talal, to learn something about the man, but the Kettral leach was quieter, more reserved than the rest of Valyn’s Wing. He proved unfailingly polite, but Kaden’s questions yielded little, and after the tenth or twelfth evasive response, Kaden started talking less, observing more. Before they flew out, he had watched Talal smudge the bright hoops in his ears with coal from the fire, then his bracelets, then his rings, working the char into the metal until it was almost as dark as his skin.

“Why don’t you just take them off?” Kaden had asked.

“You never know,” Talal had replied, shaking his head slowly, “what might come in handy out there.”

His well, Kaden realized. Every leach had one, a source from which he drew his power. The stories told of men who could pull strength from stone, women who twisted the sharp grip of terror to their own ends. The metal hoops looked innocuous enough, but Kaden found himself staring at them as though they were venomous stone spiders. It took an effort to stamp out the emotion, to look at the man as he was, not as the tales would paint him. In fact, of all the members of Valyn’s Wing, Talal seemed the most steady, the most thoughtful. His abilities were unnerving, but Valyn seemed to trust him, and Kaden didn’t have so many allies that he could afford the prejudice.

“We could spend all week hunting around the rocks,” Talal went on, gesturing to the serrated cliffs. “A couple of monks might have slipped the cordon-they know the territory, it was night.…” He glanced over at Kaden and trailed off, something that might have been compassion in his eyes.

“The whole southeastern quadrant is clear,” Annick said. If Talal was worried about Kaden’s feelings, the sniper seemed indifferent. She spoke in clipped periods, almost bored, while those icy blue eyes of hers scanned the rocks around them, never pausing. “No track. No blood. The attackers were good. For Aedolians.”

It was a telling crack. The Aedolians were some of Annur’s finest soldiers, handpicked and exhaustively trained to guard the royal family and other important visitors. How this particular group had been incited to betrayal, Kaden had no idea, but Annick’s obvious disdain spoke volumes about her own abilities.

“What are they doing down there?” Valyn asked.

Talal shrugged. “Eating. Sleeping. Cleaning weapons. They don’t know about Ut and Adiv yet. Don’t know that we arrived, that we killed the soldiers chasing Kaden.”

“How long will they stay?” Kaden asked. The slaughter seemed absolute, but some part of him wanted to descend anyway, to walk among the rubble, to look at the faces of the slain.

“No telling,” Talal replied. “They’ve got no way to know that the smaller group, the one that went after you, is dead.”

“They must have a protocol,” Annick said. “Two days, three days, before searching or retreating.”

Laith rolled his eyes. “It may shock you to discover, Annick, that some people aren’t slaves to protocol. They might not actually have a plan.”

“Which is why we would kill them,” the sniper replied, voice gelid, “if it came to a fight.”

Valyn shook his head. “It’s not going to come to a fight. There’ve got to be seventy, eighty men down there.…”

A quiet but fierce cursing from behind them cut into Valyn’s words.

“The ’Kent-kissing, Hull-buggering bastard, ” Gwenna spat, rolling easily over a spine of rock into a low, ready crouch. “That whoreson, slit-licking ass.”

Valyn rounded on her. “Keep your voice down.”

The red-haired woman waved off the objection. “They’re a quarter mile off, Valyn, and the wind’s blowing the wrong way. I could sing the ’Shael-spawned Kettral attack anthem at the top of my voice and they wouldn’t notice.”

This defiance, too, surprised Kaden. The soldiers he remembered from back in the Dawn Palace were all rigid salutes and unquestioned obedience. While it seemed that Valyn had the final call on decisions regarding his Wing, none of the others went out of their way to defer to him. Gwenna, in particular, seemed determined to nudge her toe right up to the line of insubordination. Kaden could see the irritation on his brother’s face, the strain around his eyes, tension in the jaw.