The Empire's Ruin, page 93
“I’m here,” Gwenna replied. “I’m here now.”
Jonon nodded encouragingly. “She is here. You are here.” He sucked something from between his teeth, swallowed it down, then smiled. “I knew you’d come.”
This time, the need to hurl herself at the man was so visceral it dragged her forward a couple steps before she managed to stop herself.
If Jonon had survived the avalanche, Lurie and Chent might have survived as well. It seemed unlikely, almost impossible, but then, there was the admiral, perched atop the rock, still smiling at her. He nodded some kind of vague encouragement, then took another bite. Blood dripped into the grisly mess of his matted beard. He glanced down, made a vague effort to wipe his fingers on his uniform, then shrugged.
“Where’s Lurie?” Gwenna demanded, glancing behind her. If it was an ambush, Jonon would want to draw her attention while the other two struck. “Where’s Chent?”
As though summoned by her words, a shadow slunk out from behind the rock. It took her a moment to recognize it as a man, let alone the sailor who had once been Chent. At some point, despite the cold, he had stripped away his clothes, retaining only the cutlass on the leather belt around his waist. He crouched there like a beast, gazing at her with glassy eyes while a thin line of spit dribbled from his lips. When the wind dropped, she could smell the hunger on him. He shifted his stare from Gwenna to Rat, then back again.
“He’s right here,” Jonon announced cheerfully, lifting his chin to indicate the broken creature.
Talk, Gwenna told herself, choking down the urge to fight, cut, kill. Talk until you have a plan.
“We thought you’d been killed in the rockslide.”
“You thought we’d been killed?” Jonon laughed again. His voice brimmed with joy. “Clever use of the passive construction. I think what you mean is that you thought you’d killed us.” He winked at her. “Right?”
Gwenna scanned the stones to either side.
“What about Lurie?”
Jonon spread his hands. “Poor Lurie. Chent, why don’t you tell Commander Sharpe what happened to Lurie?”
Chent blinked as though dazed by the question, then narrowed his eyes. “Crunched.” The word was barely intelligible.
The admiral smiled benignly. “I believe the word you’re looking for, sailor, is crushed.” He turned his gaze back to Gwenna, nodded regretfully as a man at a funeral. “As it turns out, you did manage to kill Lurie.”
“Lurie got slow,” Chent muttered. “Got dumb.” He began chewing his own lip, chewing it so violently it bled.
“Yes.” Jonon nodded. “Well. It’s poor form to speak disparagingly of the dead, but Lurie did prove less nimble when you brought all that rock down on top of us.” He shrugged, then brandished the bone in his right hand. “So we ate him!”
Chent turned to his admiral, straightened up somewhat, fumbled a salute, then stretched for something like his old military bearing. “If it please you, sir, a man could stand to eat some more.”
Gwenna’s stomach lurched inside her.
“Greed,” Jonon said, shaking his head ruefully, “is unbecoming in an Annurian sailor, Chent.”
“Let the girl go,” Gwenna demanded, cutting through their gruesome conversation.
Jonon frowned, leaned forward to peer over the edge of the rock. “Oh yes. The girl.”
Rat twisted away from him with a snarl.
“Sure. She can go.”
Gwenna hesitated. “Her legs are tied.”
The admiral made a dismissive gesture. “Easily solved. Easily solved. Chent, cut the rope tying the child’s legs.”
For a moment the sailor looked baffled by the command. He patted his bare chest, then his legs, fumbled with his flaccid cock, as though he expected to find some kind of weapon there. Only when the heel of his hand brushed the pommel of his cutlass did he pause, then smile.
“No,” Gwenna snapped. “He doesn’t get any closer to her.”
Jonon furrowed his brow. “Come now, Commander Sharpe. Be reasonable. If the girl is to go free, someone must free her.”
“Not. Him.”
“Ah.” The admiral nodded sagely. “You don’t trust old Chent.” He chuckled. “Can’t say that I blame you. Look. Let me do something, call it a … gesture of good faith. Chent,” he said, waving at the man with a bloody hand, “come up here.”
Chent, still fingering the handle of his cutlass, eyed Rat once more, then reluctantly turned away, leaping with surprising agility onto the boulder’s top.
“Give me your hand,” Jonon commanded.
Chent stretched out his hand.
The man who had once been the First Admiral of the Western Fleet took the sailor’s hand almost tenderly, closed his fingers slowly around it, then, with a movement too fast to follow, ripped it off at the wrist.
Chent staggered backward, stared as the wound gouted dark blood down the stump of his arm. Gwenna’s stomach shifted with something that might have been nausea or hunger.
This is wrong, she reminded herself.
Chent made a confused mewling sound.
Jonon ignored him, held the hand out to Gwenna. “This was his right hand. His good hand. He’s not as dangerous with the left.”
When Gwenna didn’t move, he frowned, tossed the hand aside.
“You are sick,” Gwenna murmured.
Jonon rolled his eyes. “Sickness. Disease. Pollution. The historian has been stuffing your head with all these words.” He frowned. “Where is the broken old man, anyway? I expected him to come with you.”
“Maybe he did,” she replied. “Maybe he’s up the canyon right now, lining up his shot.”
The notion didn’t seem to trouble Jonon. “You shouldn’t trust him, you know. There are things he hasn’t told you. Secrets. Secrets he never told any of us.”
“At least he’s not eating his own crew.”
Chent made an incoherent sound, lapped at his bloody stump.
Jonon shook his head, as though frustrated with a wayward child. “Gwenna. Come on. You were bitten by the gabhya. I was there. I saw it. This place is inside you now, just the way it is with me.”
She could feel it inside her, eating like acid through her weakness and uncertainty.
“It is,” she agreed, then fished the ring from her pocket. The whorls inside it seemed to shift, form and re-form, but when she fixed her eyes upon them they went still. “It is,” she said again, “but I found a way to fight it.”
For the first time something other than benign amusement flicked through Jonon’s green eyes. Rage, maybe. Revulsion.
“That thing,” he said, gesturing to the ring, “is disgusting. It is obscene.”
“It is a cure.”
“You don’t need a cure, Gwenna.” He gestured toward his body, then to her. “This is not something to be cured.”
“It is a plague.”
“A plague?” He snorted. “Certainly it proves too much for more … limited minds.” He gestured furtively to Chent. She could smell the amusement on him. “But for you? For me? For soldiers with the discipline to resist the more unfortunate effects while welcoming the vision and strength … For us it is a blessing. A gift.”
“Not one I want,” Gwenna replied, trying to believe the words. “When this is done, I am putting this back on.”
She raised the ring, then set it carefully on the shelf of a boulder to her side. It felt better to have it out of her pocket, not dragging at her with its weight. She lifted her right sword into a high guard.
“I’m coming for the girl now. I am going to cut her loose.”
Four paces from Rat, three, two …
The admiral nodded his encouragement, made no move for his cutlass. Smart. If he was going to attack, he’d wait until Gwenna was distracted trying to carry the girl or free her.
Rat made a sound in her throat, half growl, half moan, and hurled herself forward. She landed awkwardly, her forearms bashing against the rough stones.
Gwenna lashed out with her blade. The movement shocked her. She’d meant to wait, to grab Rat by the arms and drag her backward toward whatever passed for safety in the narrow space of the ravine. Instead, she saw her sword slice down, faster than any attack she’d ever managed, moonlight licking the dark steel. For an awful heartbeat, she thought she’d killed the child, but no.… The blade slit the rope binding Rat’s legs without even nicking the skin.
Jonon clapped. “Well done.” He sounded genuinely pleased. “You’ve seen disease before, Gwenna. It’s horrible—all sweating, and bleeding, and weakness. It’s not this.”
Rat staggered to her feet, stumbled forward into Gwenna, who wrapped an arm around her shoulders. The girl was shaking, her breath ripped into ragged gasps. She felt like a bird, all hollow bones ready to shatter, but the warmth of her steadied something inside Gwenna, a humanity that had begun to slip.
“You came back,” Rat whispered.
Gwenna didn’t take her eyes from Jonon. “Of course I came back.”
“But you came back,” she said again.
“Quickly now.” Gwenna lowered her sword, blade up.
The girl understood, laid the rope binding her wrists to the steel, and she was free.
Too easy. The whole thing had been too easy.
Gwenna glanced over her shoulder once more, but nothing moved between the stones. When she returned her gaze to Jonon, he hadn’t shifted.
“Why’d you take her?” she demanded. “Why’d you take her if you didn’t intend to keep her?”
“Keep her?” Jonon looked genuinely confused. “What would I want with a half-rabid orphan? I wanted you, Gwenna. You.”
The words filled her with a blood-black rage.
“Then you should have come for me. You didn’t need to murder Cho Lu and Pattick.”
“Well, they did attack me.”
She shackled the maelstrom grinding inside her. When she spoke again, her voice was cold, far off. “What do you want?”
Chent made an incoherent sound.
“Want?” Jonon pursed his lips. “Well, there was some disagreement there. Lurie wanted to fuck you to death, but Lurie is, well…” He gestured to the discarded femur. “Chent, on the other hand, thought we should eat you. Isn’t that right, Chent?”
The sailor looked up from his bloody stump, nodded, his eyes bright.
“But I told him no, that he had it backward.” Jonon shook his head gravely. He might have been a filthy masker play-acting an Annurian admiral. “What I want, Gwenna, is to complete the mission.” He gestured up the ravine. “No one else has kettral eggs. No one but us.”
“We were finishing the mission. You just slaughtered two of the last soldiers carrying those eggs north.”
“North.” He made a face as though he’d tasted something vaguely rotten. “No.”
Gwenna shifted to put Rat behind her. Jonon had made no effort to attack, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Even if he stayed perched on his boulder, she intended to kill the man, to butcher him down to his bones, to take from him what he’d stolen from Cho Lu and Pattick, and when that happened—she could taste her own anticipation—when that happened, she didn’t want Rat anywhere near.
“Run,” she growled. “Up the canyon to the fort. Get…” She almost said Get inside, get safe, but Rat would never agree to that, not while Gwenna herself was outside, staring down the admiral. “Get help,” she said instead. “Kiel and Dhar, go find them.”
The girl reeked of anger and confusion.
“I won’t leave.…”
“I need them, Rat. I need Kiel. Please.”
All a lie. What she needed was to be alone with Jonon, to see to the necessary justice.
Justice?
An unsteady laugh welled up in her throat.
“Hurry,” she murmured.
“I will come back,” Rat said finally, her voice just on the edge of breaking.
“Good,” Gwenna replied. “Go fast now. Go as fast as you can.”
“I will come back.”
“I know you will.”
Don’t, she thought.
Dhar would see to that. If Rat made it up the canyon, the captain would get her inside the fortress. If necessary he’d drag the door closed behind them both, broken knee or no. She wouldn’t be safe, but she’d be safer. Kiel was Csestriim. He’d find some way to get the two of them free. They had kettral eggs, after all. Adare would send another whole expedition if she had to, a dozen ’Kent-kissing ships.
The clatter of pebbles over stone marked the sound of Rat’s retreat. The girl was fast, scampering up the canyon like a mountain goat. As the sound faded, something slipped inside Gwenna, some constraint—invisible but strong as any leash or ligament—that had held her in check. Her flesh ached strength.
Wait, she reminded herself. Let Rat get away.
Jonon watched her. He smelled of bemusement.
“I was wrong about you,” he said.
“Yes.” Her voice sounded dead, even to her own ears.
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “I thought you were weak—”
“I was weak.”
Memory rolled over her, disgust at what she’d been, at what she’d allowed herself to become.
“You were not at your best,” Jonon acknowledged with a smile. “But then, neither was I.” His eyes went distant. “We were weak in different ways. I was like glass, like some gem—hard but brittle. You, on the other hand, were a rotten, rotting thing.”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh, I know you’re not. I know!”
“And it’s not because of the gabhya. I killed the kettral before I ever set foot in that jungle. I survived your little keelhauling.”
She donned the facts as though they were armor. Against Jonon? Against the poison raging inside her? Against her own desire to rip and rend?
He laughed. “And no one was more surprised than me! You’re right—you were finding yourself again, even then, but this…” He gestured to her. “This is something new.”
“New…” Chent drooled.
Jonon frowned, turned to the sailor. “Chent, show this woman the truth.”
Chent stared at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes while he lapped at his bloody stump. The wound should have already killed him, drained away his consciousness at the very least, but it had clotted faster than a normal wound. The strange strength of Menkiddoc at work, even there.
“Go ahead, Chent,” Jonon said. “You can have her.”
Gwenna felt a growl rising in her throat. “I will cut him apart.”
Jonon smiled, spread his hands. “Would it not be a mercy?”
Mercy.
Gwenna turned the word over in her mind.
“It is murder,” she replied finally.
“You’re a soldier, Gwenna. Soldiers kill people. That’s your job.”
There was something wrong with the idea, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She had killed people, killed them by the dozens, by the scores, killed so many people she couldn’t remember all the faces anymore, people far better than Chent. It was what she’d trained to do, what she’d spent her entire life practicing. Not only had she killed them, but she’d felt satisfaction in the act, the well-being of having done a difficult, dangerous job and done it well.
She turned her attention from Jonon to the sailor. He looked up at her with glazed eyes, half-dead already.
“Chent,” Jonon said mildly. “Bring me Gwenna’s heart.”
The man’s face lurched into a smile and he stumbled down off the boulder.
“You want to know what he said to me back on the Daybreak?” Jonon asked. “Tell her, Chent, tell her what you kept telling me.”
“Give,” the man murmured, his lips bubbling with his own blood.
Jonon nodded. “That’s right. Give her to me. That’s what he said. If I gave you to him—him, and Vessik, and Lurie—they’d teach you a lesson. You’d never disrespect me again. That’s what he promised.”
Gwenna stepped forward, put the point of her sword to the sailor’s neck.
“What lesson?” she asked, her voice quiet.
Chent stared at the blade, baffled. He seemed to have forgotten he had a weapon of his own.
Gwenna leaned into the blade. “What lesson?”
“Teach you,” he mumbled. “Teach you and that Rat girl…”
The steel slid through his throat, cutting off the words.
Blood splattered her face.
Breath rattled out through the gash.
Before he could fall, Gwenna shot out a hand, drove two fingers into the wound, held him up like a fish through the gills while he gaped and struggled to breathe, while his eyes went wide and glassy and the strength ebbed from his flesh. A shiver of satisfaction ran through her, the silent, wordless thrill of watching a bad man die a bad death at her own hands.
Justice.
And something older. Something worse.
She let Chent drop, wiped her fingers over her cheeks. His blood was still hot. It smelled sweet. A blissful dizziness swept her up.
“See?” Jonon said cheerfully.
“See what?”
“You were frightened once, weak and pathetic. Not anymore.”
She tried to remember being frightened, tried to remember the endless days she’d spent crouching in the brig, found them thin as last week’s dreams. Strength raged inside her. It felt wonderful.
Finish it, she hissed to herself, then put the ring back on.
For a moment she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.
She shifted her gaze to Jonon, opened her mouth to speak, found she had nothing to say. The words they’d been trading back and forth felt like so much rubble—the wreckage left behind after the crumbling of a proud structure. There’d been a point to it all once, a meaning, a purpose. She couldn’t say what.
The man who had been admiral sighed expansively. “You’re not going to join me, are you?”
She didn’t bother replying. Moonlight blazed bright as the sun. Wind honed the edges of everything, until the world looked carved from crystal. She could see each pore on Jonon’s face, every clot of blood in his black beard, every vessel in the whites of his eyes. If she bothered, she could hear his heart beating, the pulse throbbing in his veins. When he took up his cutlass and rose to his feet—less the motion of a man standing than a snake uncoiling for the strike—a thrill surged through her. No more words, not even words like justice or revenge. Speech was for the weak, and she was finished being weak.
Jonon nodded encouragingly. “She is here. You are here.” He sucked something from between his teeth, swallowed it down, then smiled. “I knew you’d come.”
This time, the need to hurl herself at the man was so visceral it dragged her forward a couple steps before she managed to stop herself.
If Jonon had survived the avalanche, Lurie and Chent might have survived as well. It seemed unlikely, almost impossible, but then, there was the admiral, perched atop the rock, still smiling at her. He nodded some kind of vague encouragement, then took another bite. Blood dripped into the grisly mess of his matted beard. He glanced down, made a vague effort to wipe his fingers on his uniform, then shrugged.
“Where’s Lurie?” Gwenna demanded, glancing behind her. If it was an ambush, Jonon would want to draw her attention while the other two struck. “Where’s Chent?”
As though summoned by her words, a shadow slunk out from behind the rock. It took her a moment to recognize it as a man, let alone the sailor who had once been Chent. At some point, despite the cold, he had stripped away his clothes, retaining only the cutlass on the leather belt around his waist. He crouched there like a beast, gazing at her with glassy eyes while a thin line of spit dribbled from his lips. When the wind dropped, she could smell the hunger on him. He shifted his stare from Gwenna to Rat, then back again.
“He’s right here,” Jonon announced cheerfully, lifting his chin to indicate the broken creature.
Talk, Gwenna told herself, choking down the urge to fight, cut, kill. Talk until you have a plan.
“We thought you’d been killed in the rockslide.”
“You thought we’d been killed?” Jonon laughed again. His voice brimmed with joy. “Clever use of the passive construction. I think what you mean is that you thought you’d killed us.” He winked at her. “Right?”
Gwenna scanned the stones to either side.
“What about Lurie?”
Jonon spread his hands. “Poor Lurie. Chent, why don’t you tell Commander Sharpe what happened to Lurie?”
Chent blinked as though dazed by the question, then narrowed his eyes. “Crunched.” The word was barely intelligible.
The admiral smiled benignly. “I believe the word you’re looking for, sailor, is crushed.” He turned his gaze back to Gwenna, nodded regretfully as a man at a funeral. “As it turns out, you did manage to kill Lurie.”
“Lurie got slow,” Chent muttered. “Got dumb.” He began chewing his own lip, chewing it so violently it bled.
“Yes.” Jonon nodded. “Well. It’s poor form to speak disparagingly of the dead, but Lurie did prove less nimble when you brought all that rock down on top of us.” He shrugged, then brandished the bone in his right hand. “So we ate him!”
Chent turned to his admiral, straightened up somewhat, fumbled a salute, then stretched for something like his old military bearing. “If it please you, sir, a man could stand to eat some more.”
Gwenna’s stomach lurched inside her.
“Greed,” Jonon said, shaking his head ruefully, “is unbecoming in an Annurian sailor, Chent.”
“Let the girl go,” Gwenna demanded, cutting through their gruesome conversation.
Jonon frowned, leaned forward to peer over the edge of the rock. “Oh yes. The girl.”
Rat twisted away from him with a snarl.
“Sure. She can go.”
Gwenna hesitated. “Her legs are tied.”
The admiral made a dismissive gesture. “Easily solved. Easily solved. Chent, cut the rope tying the child’s legs.”
For a moment the sailor looked baffled by the command. He patted his bare chest, then his legs, fumbled with his flaccid cock, as though he expected to find some kind of weapon there. Only when the heel of his hand brushed the pommel of his cutlass did he pause, then smile.
“No,” Gwenna snapped. “He doesn’t get any closer to her.”
Jonon furrowed his brow. “Come now, Commander Sharpe. Be reasonable. If the girl is to go free, someone must free her.”
“Not. Him.”
“Ah.” The admiral nodded sagely. “You don’t trust old Chent.” He chuckled. “Can’t say that I blame you. Look. Let me do something, call it a … gesture of good faith. Chent,” he said, waving at the man with a bloody hand, “come up here.”
Chent, still fingering the handle of his cutlass, eyed Rat once more, then reluctantly turned away, leaping with surprising agility onto the boulder’s top.
“Give me your hand,” Jonon commanded.
Chent stretched out his hand.
The man who had once been the First Admiral of the Western Fleet took the sailor’s hand almost tenderly, closed his fingers slowly around it, then, with a movement too fast to follow, ripped it off at the wrist.
Chent staggered backward, stared as the wound gouted dark blood down the stump of his arm. Gwenna’s stomach shifted with something that might have been nausea or hunger.
This is wrong, she reminded herself.
Chent made a confused mewling sound.
Jonon ignored him, held the hand out to Gwenna. “This was his right hand. His good hand. He’s not as dangerous with the left.”
When Gwenna didn’t move, he frowned, tossed the hand aside.
“You are sick,” Gwenna murmured.
Jonon rolled his eyes. “Sickness. Disease. Pollution. The historian has been stuffing your head with all these words.” He frowned. “Where is the broken old man, anyway? I expected him to come with you.”
“Maybe he did,” she replied. “Maybe he’s up the canyon right now, lining up his shot.”
The notion didn’t seem to trouble Jonon. “You shouldn’t trust him, you know. There are things he hasn’t told you. Secrets. Secrets he never told any of us.”
“At least he’s not eating his own crew.”
Chent made an incoherent sound, lapped at his bloody stump.
Jonon shook his head, as though frustrated with a wayward child. “Gwenna. Come on. You were bitten by the gabhya. I was there. I saw it. This place is inside you now, just the way it is with me.”
She could feel it inside her, eating like acid through her weakness and uncertainty.
“It is,” she agreed, then fished the ring from her pocket. The whorls inside it seemed to shift, form and re-form, but when she fixed her eyes upon them they went still. “It is,” she said again, “but I found a way to fight it.”
For the first time something other than benign amusement flicked through Jonon’s green eyes. Rage, maybe. Revulsion.
“That thing,” he said, gesturing to the ring, “is disgusting. It is obscene.”
“It is a cure.”
“You don’t need a cure, Gwenna.” He gestured toward his body, then to her. “This is not something to be cured.”
“It is a plague.”
“A plague?” He snorted. “Certainly it proves too much for more … limited minds.” He gestured furtively to Chent. She could smell the amusement on him. “But for you? For me? For soldiers with the discipline to resist the more unfortunate effects while welcoming the vision and strength … For us it is a blessing. A gift.”
“Not one I want,” Gwenna replied, trying to believe the words. “When this is done, I am putting this back on.”
She raised the ring, then set it carefully on the shelf of a boulder to her side. It felt better to have it out of her pocket, not dragging at her with its weight. She lifted her right sword into a high guard.
“I’m coming for the girl now. I am going to cut her loose.”
Four paces from Rat, three, two …
The admiral nodded his encouragement, made no move for his cutlass. Smart. If he was going to attack, he’d wait until Gwenna was distracted trying to carry the girl or free her.
Rat made a sound in her throat, half growl, half moan, and hurled herself forward. She landed awkwardly, her forearms bashing against the rough stones.
Gwenna lashed out with her blade. The movement shocked her. She’d meant to wait, to grab Rat by the arms and drag her backward toward whatever passed for safety in the narrow space of the ravine. Instead, she saw her sword slice down, faster than any attack she’d ever managed, moonlight licking the dark steel. For an awful heartbeat, she thought she’d killed the child, but no.… The blade slit the rope binding Rat’s legs without even nicking the skin.
Jonon clapped. “Well done.” He sounded genuinely pleased. “You’ve seen disease before, Gwenna. It’s horrible—all sweating, and bleeding, and weakness. It’s not this.”
Rat staggered to her feet, stumbled forward into Gwenna, who wrapped an arm around her shoulders. The girl was shaking, her breath ripped into ragged gasps. She felt like a bird, all hollow bones ready to shatter, but the warmth of her steadied something inside Gwenna, a humanity that had begun to slip.
“You came back,” Rat whispered.
Gwenna didn’t take her eyes from Jonon. “Of course I came back.”
“But you came back,” she said again.
“Quickly now.” Gwenna lowered her sword, blade up.
The girl understood, laid the rope binding her wrists to the steel, and she was free.
Too easy. The whole thing had been too easy.
Gwenna glanced over her shoulder once more, but nothing moved between the stones. When she returned her gaze to Jonon, he hadn’t shifted.
“Why’d you take her?” she demanded. “Why’d you take her if you didn’t intend to keep her?”
“Keep her?” Jonon looked genuinely confused. “What would I want with a half-rabid orphan? I wanted you, Gwenna. You.”
The words filled her with a blood-black rage.
“Then you should have come for me. You didn’t need to murder Cho Lu and Pattick.”
“Well, they did attack me.”
She shackled the maelstrom grinding inside her. When she spoke again, her voice was cold, far off. “What do you want?”
Chent made an incoherent sound.
“Want?” Jonon pursed his lips. “Well, there was some disagreement there. Lurie wanted to fuck you to death, but Lurie is, well…” He gestured to the discarded femur. “Chent, on the other hand, thought we should eat you. Isn’t that right, Chent?”
The sailor looked up from his bloody stump, nodded, his eyes bright.
“But I told him no, that he had it backward.” Jonon shook his head gravely. He might have been a filthy masker play-acting an Annurian admiral. “What I want, Gwenna, is to complete the mission.” He gestured up the ravine. “No one else has kettral eggs. No one but us.”
“We were finishing the mission. You just slaughtered two of the last soldiers carrying those eggs north.”
“North.” He made a face as though he’d tasted something vaguely rotten. “No.”
Gwenna shifted to put Rat behind her. Jonon had made no effort to attack, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Even if he stayed perched on his boulder, she intended to kill the man, to butcher him down to his bones, to take from him what he’d stolen from Cho Lu and Pattick, and when that happened—she could taste her own anticipation—when that happened, she didn’t want Rat anywhere near.
“Run,” she growled. “Up the canyon to the fort. Get…” She almost said Get inside, get safe, but Rat would never agree to that, not while Gwenna herself was outside, staring down the admiral. “Get help,” she said instead. “Kiel and Dhar, go find them.”
The girl reeked of anger and confusion.
“I won’t leave.…”
“I need them, Rat. I need Kiel. Please.”
All a lie. What she needed was to be alone with Jonon, to see to the necessary justice.
Justice?
An unsteady laugh welled up in her throat.
“Hurry,” she murmured.
“I will come back,” Rat said finally, her voice just on the edge of breaking.
“Good,” Gwenna replied. “Go fast now. Go as fast as you can.”
“I will come back.”
“I know you will.”
Don’t, she thought.
Dhar would see to that. If Rat made it up the canyon, the captain would get her inside the fortress. If necessary he’d drag the door closed behind them both, broken knee or no. She wouldn’t be safe, but she’d be safer. Kiel was Csestriim. He’d find some way to get the two of them free. They had kettral eggs, after all. Adare would send another whole expedition if she had to, a dozen ’Kent-kissing ships.
The clatter of pebbles over stone marked the sound of Rat’s retreat. The girl was fast, scampering up the canyon like a mountain goat. As the sound faded, something slipped inside Gwenna, some constraint—invisible but strong as any leash or ligament—that had held her in check. Her flesh ached strength.
Wait, she reminded herself. Let Rat get away.
Jonon watched her. He smelled of bemusement.
“I was wrong about you,” he said.
“Yes.” Her voice sounded dead, even to her own ears.
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “I thought you were weak—”
“I was weak.”
Memory rolled over her, disgust at what she’d been, at what she’d allowed herself to become.
“You were not at your best,” Jonon acknowledged with a smile. “But then, neither was I.” His eyes went distant. “We were weak in different ways. I was like glass, like some gem—hard but brittle. You, on the other hand, were a rotten, rotting thing.”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh, I know you’re not. I know!”
“And it’s not because of the gabhya. I killed the kettral before I ever set foot in that jungle. I survived your little keelhauling.”
She donned the facts as though they were armor. Against Jonon? Against the poison raging inside her? Against her own desire to rip and rend?
He laughed. “And no one was more surprised than me! You’re right—you were finding yourself again, even then, but this…” He gestured to her. “This is something new.”
“New…” Chent drooled.
Jonon frowned, turned to the sailor. “Chent, show this woman the truth.”
Chent stared at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes while he lapped at his bloody stump. The wound should have already killed him, drained away his consciousness at the very least, but it had clotted faster than a normal wound. The strange strength of Menkiddoc at work, even there.
“Go ahead, Chent,” Jonon said. “You can have her.”
Gwenna felt a growl rising in her throat. “I will cut him apart.”
Jonon smiled, spread his hands. “Would it not be a mercy?”
Mercy.
Gwenna turned the word over in her mind.
“It is murder,” she replied finally.
“You’re a soldier, Gwenna. Soldiers kill people. That’s your job.”
There was something wrong with the idea, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She had killed people, killed them by the dozens, by the scores, killed so many people she couldn’t remember all the faces anymore, people far better than Chent. It was what she’d trained to do, what she’d spent her entire life practicing. Not only had she killed them, but she’d felt satisfaction in the act, the well-being of having done a difficult, dangerous job and done it well.
She turned her attention from Jonon to the sailor. He looked up at her with glazed eyes, half-dead already.
“Chent,” Jonon said mildly. “Bring me Gwenna’s heart.”
The man’s face lurched into a smile and he stumbled down off the boulder.
“You want to know what he said to me back on the Daybreak?” Jonon asked. “Tell her, Chent, tell her what you kept telling me.”
“Give,” the man murmured, his lips bubbling with his own blood.
Jonon nodded. “That’s right. Give her to me. That’s what he said. If I gave you to him—him, and Vessik, and Lurie—they’d teach you a lesson. You’d never disrespect me again. That’s what he promised.”
Gwenna stepped forward, put the point of her sword to the sailor’s neck.
“What lesson?” she asked, her voice quiet.
Chent stared at the blade, baffled. He seemed to have forgotten he had a weapon of his own.
Gwenna leaned into the blade. “What lesson?”
“Teach you,” he mumbled. “Teach you and that Rat girl…”
The steel slid through his throat, cutting off the words.
Blood splattered her face.
Breath rattled out through the gash.
Before he could fall, Gwenna shot out a hand, drove two fingers into the wound, held him up like a fish through the gills while he gaped and struggled to breathe, while his eyes went wide and glassy and the strength ebbed from his flesh. A shiver of satisfaction ran through her, the silent, wordless thrill of watching a bad man die a bad death at her own hands.
Justice.
And something older. Something worse.
She let Chent drop, wiped her fingers over her cheeks. His blood was still hot. It smelled sweet. A blissful dizziness swept her up.
“See?” Jonon said cheerfully.
“See what?”
“You were frightened once, weak and pathetic. Not anymore.”
She tried to remember being frightened, tried to remember the endless days she’d spent crouching in the brig, found them thin as last week’s dreams. Strength raged inside her. It felt wonderful.
Finish it, she hissed to herself, then put the ring back on.
For a moment she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.
She shifted her gaze to Jonon, opened her mouth to speak, found she had nothing to say. The words they’d been trading back and forth felt like so much rubble—the wreckage left behind after the crumbling of a proud structure. There’d been a point to it all once, a meaning, a purpose. She couldn’t say what.
The man who had been admiral sighed expansively. “You’re not going to join me, are you?”
She didn’t bother replying. Moonlight blazed bright as the sun. Wind honed the edges of everything, until the world looked carved from crystal. She could see each pore on Jonon’s face, every clot of blood in his black beard, every vessel in the whites of his eyes. If she bothered, she could hear his heart beating, the pulse throbbing in his veins. When he took up his cutlass and rose to his feet—less the motion of a man standing than a snake uncoiling for the strike—a thrill surged through her. No more words, not even words like justice or revenge. Speech was for the weak, and she was finished being weak.
