Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

It meant months of convalescence, the rest of the summer and fall-walking before she could run, floating before she could swim, lifting the fucking swords before there was any point in trying to swing them-before Gwenna felt even half qualified to call herself a Kettral once more. An entire summer and fall gone before they could even contemplate going anywhere or killing anyone. Gwenna had no idea where to go or who to kill, but it seemed like they were going to need to do plenty of both. When they were finally whole enough to travel, the snow was already piled up to the eaves. Covering half a mile took half a day. And so, for another season, they were forced to hunker down, live off of venison stew, and try not to kill one another.

The extra winter months up north weren’t all bad. It meant they were all fully healed before heading south, at least as strong and quick as they had been back on the Islands, wounds that should not have closed at all finally knitted. The disadvantage was that the rest of the world hadn’t been convalescing inside a snowbound cottage for nine months, and when Gwenna, Talal, and Annick finally emerged, they had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Nothing good-that much was clear as soon as they broke free of the northern forests. The Urghul were everywhere, burning shit, killing people, erecting altars to their suffering and their god, generally getting blood on everything. Worse, Balendin was still alive. Gwenna had hoped that somehow, in the chaos and carnage of Andt-Kyl, the traitorous Kettral leach would have taken a blade to the brain. It seemed plausible, at least, given the twin Annurian armies that had swept up the coasts of Scar Lake.

Hope, as usual, proved to be a miserable bitch.

They weren’t even out of the woods before they started hearing reports of an Urghul commander who was not Urghul, a man with dark skin and dark hair, a leach with black eagles perched on either shoulder, a warrior whose thirst for blood outstripped even that of the Urghul. The horsemen called him the Anvil, but it was obviously Balendin. He couldn’t be fought, people whispered. Couldn’t be defeated. He could light whole forests ablaze with a wave of his hand, could snap his fingers and watch the heads of his foes explode.

“We could kill him,” Annick had suggested.

Gwenna had mulled it over. It was tempting, but following your temptations was a good way to get dead.

“No,” she said finally, “we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t have a bird and we don’t have a full Wing.”

“You don’t need a bird or a full Wing to kill a man.”

Talal had shaken his head at that. “He’s not just a man, Annick. His power-it’s self-fulfilling. Everyone across the north is terrified of him, and all that terror just makes him stronger.” His face was sober. “The things he could do back on the Islands, or even in Andt-Kyl … those were nothing.”

“He should be punished,” Annick insisted.

“He will be punished,” Gwenna said, “but since it looks like we’re the ones who are going to have to do the punishing, let’s try to get it right the first time, eh? We need a bird, we need more people, and we need to know what in Hull’s name is going on.”

“Where are we going to get all that?” Annick asked.

“We’re going to start by finding Valyn’s brother and beating some answers out of him,” Gwenna replied. “Which means we’re going to Annur.”

She had steeled herself for an argument, for Annick to demand an attack on Balendin, or for Talal to insist on an immediate return to the Qirins.

Instead, Talal nodded. “All right,” he said quietly. “Annur.”

Annick just shrugged.

It was disconcerting, this deference, unsettling. Gwenna wasn’t the Wing’s commander-with Valyn and Laith dead, there was barely even a Wing left to command-but the other two, for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, had started accepting her decisions as though they were orders, as though she weren’t just making it all up as she went along, as though she had some larger, more coherent vision in mind beyond just keeping them alive from one day to the next. Which she most certainly did not.

It didn’t make any sense. Talal and Annick were both better soldiers than Gwenna. Annick was already a legend among the Kettral snipers, and Talal-though he lacked Annick’s obvious, ostentatious skill-had a good military mind and was cool enough to use it, even when the world was burning down around him. Either one of them could have commanded their truncated abortion of a Wing better than Gwenna herself … and yet they didn’t.

Annick might argue some small tactical issue, but mostly she seemed to want to oil her bow and take target practice. Talal would actually say more than two or three words on a given topic, but he seemed to prefer advising to leading. And so Gwenna ended up making the choices, despite the fact that she had no fucking idea what she was doing. The whole situation made her itchy, twitchy, irritable, but what could you do? Someone had to make the ’Kent-kissing decisions.

And so they came to Annur, set up shop inside the warehouse, cased the Dawn Palace, broke into it, then into the Spear, knocked out the Aedolians guarding what was supposed to be Kaden’s personal study, planted the note, and slipped out. The whole thing, as it turned out, was ludicrously, stupidly easy. The problem with having the largest fortress in the world was just that: it was fucking large . There were thousands of men and women inside, maybe ten thousand: bureaucrats to push the papers, masons to fix the walls, gardeners to keep the plants in line, petitioners dumb enough to think anyone in charge actually gave a pickled shit about their fishing rights or rice supplies or guild licenses or whatever. With a minimal amount of planning and improvisation, you could pretty much go anywhere you wanted. With a little more effort, Gwenna felt pretty sure they could have killed Kaden or any of the other members of the council, but she didn’t want to kill him. At least not yet. Not until she had a better sense of what in Hull’s name was going on.

“You think he found the note?” she asked of no one in particular, scanning the dim space of the warehouse as though the answer might be hidden between the dusty crates.

Annick ignored her, probably because Gwenna had asked the question a dozen times already.

“If he hasn’t yet,” Talal replied, “I think he will soon. That monastic training…” He shook his head. “Evidently they can remember everything, remember it perfectly.”

“But do you think he’ll know what it means ?”

“I think,” Annick broke in, tugging her arrows from the wooden post, checking the shafts and the fletching one by one, “that there’s nothing we can do about Kaden now. What’s important is focusing on our own readiness in case he does come.”

Gwenna blew out an exasperated breath. “Fuck, Annick. How much more ready do you want to be? I’ve got every door and window rigged, that post you’re shooting at is ready to blow, we’ve packed enough steel into those crates,” she gestured toward the wall, “that Talal should be able to…” She squinted at the leach. “What can you do with that much steel, exactly?”

Talal crossed to one of the wooden crates, set a hand on it as though it were a woodstove he was testing for heat. After a moment he turned, hand still on the crate, narrowed his eyes, and then Annick’s arrows, gathered in her fist like a deadly bouquet, leapt free, aligned themselves into a hovering phalanx, then hung quivering in the air.

The sniper didn’t flinch. “Don’t break them,” she said.

Talal flicked a finger, and the arrows flew the length of the warehouse, burying themselves in the far wooden wall. It was enough to see him burned alive in almost any part of Annur outside the Qirins; enough to see him burned alive, but hardly an overwhelming display of military force.