The Last Mortal Bond (100 page)

That pain is there to stop me,
he thought.
That, and the hope, and the fear.

All his human feelings, just a fence, a wall built by the gods to keep their precious chattel penned.

Such a meager fence
.

Meshkent was raging now, bellowing, his demands all tangled up with his defiance. It didn't matter, the god was on the far side of the ridge, caught deep in a chasm he could not escape. If Kaden dropped into the
vaniate
once more there would be no climbing free, not this time. Kiel had been warning him about that for months, but Kiel was wrong. How could the Csestriim understand how badly humanity was broken, how desperately in need of salvation?

The walking away
. That was what the monks called that passage, the departure from the world of human need into a more perfect world of sky, and snow, and stone. They were wrong, too. The walking was secondary, unnecessary. All that was necessary was the letting go. Kaden considered the shape of his mind, that narrow knife of stone stretching on endlessly into the clouds. He felt his grip slipping. He smiled, and let go.

The
vaniate
closed around him, endless and unsullied. It seemed impossible, inside that emptiness, that he had ever considered the haphazard construction of flesh and blood his
self
. He looked at the knife, at where the blade's point opened the skin of his arm. He'd fought so hard to preserve his carcass, and for what? The Shin had thrown open the door to his cage, and he had slammed it closed again, had hung against the bars, refusing to be set free.

It's so easy. Easier than breathing
.

Meshkent roared. The sound meant nothing.

Then Triste closed her hand over his wrist, pulling the knife away.

“What are you
doing
?”

Kaden turned to her, confused. “I'm leaving.…” He gestured to the slash along his skin.

“You can't,” she snarled, face a rictus of fear and confusion.

“Triste,” he said quietly. “You don't understand. Everything you're feeling now—you don't have to feel it. You're not
supposed
to. You're a sick woman insisting on the beauty of your sickness.” He smiled at her. “We can be well. Whole.”

He tried to go back to his work, but she had him by the wrist. Her fingers felt like steel.

“Let me go, Triste.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“All of this, everything wrong in my fucking life, happened because of you, and you are
not leaving me here alone
.”

He smiled. “I won't leave you. We can both be done with this.” With his free hand, he ran a finger along her neck. Her skin was smooth as cream. Something stirred inside him, some spasm of the beast he had been. He crushed it. “You're trapped,” he said, tracing a line down to her heart. He could feel it slamming against her chest. “You don't have to be.”

“Stop saying that.”

Kaden shook his head. Blood slicked his arm, but it wasn't enough. He needed to cut deeper, further.

“Let me go, Triste.”

“I already told you—you are
not
fucking
leaving me,
you
bastard.
”

She pivoted as she spoke, twisted his wrist so viciously that the knife fell free and then, he, too, was falling.

So strong,
he thought vaguely. Even on that first night in Ashk'lan, when she was waiting for him naked in his bed, Triste had always been so strong.

He landed hard, the stone bruising his hip, then jarring his skull as it struck. For a few heartbeats, he reeled, dizzy, confused, the
vaniate
swaying around him. Pain blazed outside the trance, in his arm, in the back of his head, but he was free of the pain, if only …

“Stop it!” Triste screamed. She hit him across the face. “Don't you fucking retreat into your private trance. You're not
leaving
me here.” She hit him again. “YOU ARE NOT LEAVING ME.” Her breath was ripped and ragged. Her body shuddered with the terror and the strain. “I won't let you. I won't let you.” Tears soaked her face, matting her hair to her brow and cheeks in scribbled tangles. She was a vision of suffering, of madness, of everything that was wrong with what they had become.

The Csestriim were right,
Kaden thought.

And then she stopped shouting. Stopped moving entirely. He could feel her weight on top of him, suddenly still and steady. Only her chest rose and fell as her lungs struggled to drag in more air. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper, quiet, composed, but hard as carved stone.

“I won't let you leave me alone with this.”

“Triste…,” he began again.

She shook her head. She was still crying, but her eyes were defiant, the way he remembered them. Strong. She leaned in, down, and pressed her lips to his.

It was harder than he expected to pull away. “You hate me, Triste.”

“I do,” she whispered.

“I betrayed you.”

“You betrayed me, and you gave me away. And do you think that absolves you now? It doesn't. Just this one time, Kaden, this last time, I'm not begging you, I'm telling you, I'm demanding this of you:
don't
.”

Her eyes were wide as moons, bright, violent, violet, shifting with the light reflected from his own burning gaze. Her weight was like the whole warm night laid on top of him.

“Every choice that you have made was wrong,” she whispered. “I am finished doing things your way.”

The second kiss didn't pull him from the
vaniate,
not right away, but if the trance was a bottomless well into which he had been falling, Triste's touch was a hook lodged in his mind, arresting his fall, holding him spinning in the emptiness. And then, with a horrible, ineluctable slowness, pulling him up.

The monks had trained Kaden to be hit. They had trained him to sit in the snow for hours on end. They had trained him to haul stones until his hands bled, to starve, to suffer, and then to step outside that suffering. They had trained him for every manner of austerity to which the flesh could be subjected. They had not trained him for this.

He managed to pull away for a half a heartbeat.

“Triste…” The word scraped out. There were no others.

Her hands were cradling the back of his head, her chest pressed against his chest, her tongue running over his teeth. It was how she'd killed Ekhard Matol, pinning him against the
kenta
with her meager weight, then breaking him apart limb by limb. Only that hadn't been Triste. That had been Ciena.

When Kaden looked into the eyes of the woman who held him now, there was no sign of the goddess. There was only the woman, strong, furious, determined, pressing herself into him, tearing at his shirt, sliding her hands over his chest. He opened his arms, pulled her toward him, and woke from the
vaniate
.

The beast brain.
That was what the monks called all the myriad impulses of the flesh: rage and hunger, fear and eagerness and lust. For all their warnings, Kaden had never really known its strength.

He slid his hands up Triste's back, over the ridges of her scarred skin, then pulled her light shirt up over her head. She twisted to help, hurled the shirt free, then was on him again, skin sliding over skin, firm and smooth.

Triste's breath came hot through her parted lips. “Suffering is not everything.”

Kaden kissed her, then kissed her again. Then again.

“The monks were wrong,” he whispered finally, his own words a revelation. “Il Tornja was wrong.”

“Of course they were, you idiot. Of course they were fucking wrong.”

They spent the night discovering just how wrong, clutching each other, whispering things they barely understood, finding something painful and perfect in the places where their skin touched, something old and undeniable, a truth that both had heard a hundred times but neither one had known, all while the desert moon slid down the sky, and the million stars, shivering and indifferent, burned their holes into the night.

 

54

Gwenna could still remember the day she'd fallen in love with Valyn. Or maybe
love
wasn't the right word—she was only twelve at the time—but whatever it was had hit her like a sack of bricks to the gut.

Every year there was a smallboat race around Qarsh. Vets went up against vets, and the cadets had their own division. Gwenna had never been much for sailing; the wind always seemed to be blowing the wrong way, and she'd been hit in the head by a swinging boom one too many times. Still, a race was a race, and she'd be shipped to 'Shael if she sat it out on the beach while the other cadets got all wet and beat up. There was a young soldier named Gelly. The girl wasn't much with a blade or a bow—she washed out long before the Trial—but she could handle a boat, and so Gwenna went looking for her a month before the race.

“We're a team,” she said.

Gelly had looked at her, uncertainty painted across her face. “We…”

“The boat race,” Gwenna snapped. “You want in?”

The girl nodded hesitantly.

“Good,” Gwenna said gruffly. “And just so we're on the same page, I don't give a pickled shit if we win. I just want to beat Sami Yurl and that Malkeenian.”

Gwenna had lumped them together, back then. Yurl and Valyn were both rich, both nobility, and even the unending rigors of Kettral training hadn't yet managed to wash the stink of privilege off either of them. Everything about Valyn irritated Gwenna—the way he spoke, the way he addressed himself to the other cadets, even the way he sat in the mess hall, that royal spine of his just a little too straight. Unfortunately, he was a good sailor, better than Gwenna. Hence the need for Gelly.

The race was chaos before it even began. A summer storm had blown up out of the south, and the swells were fifteen feet high even when they were trying to coax the boats to the starting line. By the time they rounded the West Bluffs the warm rain came down like a wall, so heavy Gwenna couldn't see more than a few feet in front of her. Gelly had managed the boat brilliantly in the first stages of the storm, but as thunder smashed overhead, Gwenna could see the girl starting to fray.

“We should go in!” Gelly shouted over the gale, pointing vaguely south, toward where Qarsh was supposed to be.

“To Hull with that,” Gwenna bellowed, hauling on the line, trying to keep the sail from ripping free of her hands.

“We can't manage the boat,” Gelly insisted. “Not in this.”

“You just keep steering,” Gwenna shouted. “I'll take care of the sail.”

In truth, however, Gelly was right. Two people could handle the boat, even in brisk weather, but the storm had moved well beyond brisk. They'd already buried the gunwale in the side of a swell three times. If they didn't furl the sail, the boat was going over, and they were headed into the drink. It was simple as that.

“Valyn and Yurl can't sail in this either,” Gelly shouted.

Gwenna gritted her teeth, cursed the storm and her own weakness, and prepared to pull the sail. Then, between one swell and the next, another boat loomed up out of the rain. It was canted over hard, the sail drum-taut, and on them before Gelly could even swing the rudder. Ha Lin was hiked out over the rail, hair plastered to her face, both hands wrapped around the line as she tried to manage the sail. She noticed Gwenna half a heartbeat later, tried to ease off the line, grimaced as she shouted something to Valyn. The prince ran his eyes over Gwenna's boat. He looked as beaten up as Gwenna felt, but there was no quitting in those dark eyes. He shouted something back to Ha Lin. Gwenna couldn't make out the exchange, but the other girl shook her head. Valyn nodded fiercely and kicked the rudder over.

Gwenna's first thought was that the Malkeenian bastard was trying to ram them. His boat slid down the south side of the swell, straight at her beam. Gwenna shifted, trying to get clear of the collision, but then, at the last minute, Valyn swung the rudder around again, running his boat tight in parallel with Gwenna's.

“Go,” he shouted, handling the rudder with one hand while he stabbed his finger at Gwenna's boat with the other.

He wasn't talking to her. He was talking to Ha Lin.

The girl hesitated, glanced from Valyn to Gwenna, then back.

“Go,” he shouted again. “I'll be fine.”

Ha Lin gritted her teeth and jumped, caught the gunwale of Gwenna's boat and hauled herself in.

“Stubborn fucking bastard,” she was muttering.

Without Ha Lin managing the sail, everything had gone straight to shit over on Valyn's boat. The boom swung crazily in the wind, and he looked likely to capsize as the vessel went dead in the water. Valyn, however, was grinning, waving them on even as he fought to keep the boat upright.

“Go win,” he shouted as he faded back into the rain. “Go win!”

They did.

Valyn, on the other hand, didn't manage to coax his boat back into the harbor until late that night, when the worst of the storm had passed. When he finally climbed up onto the dock, Gwenna started to go to him, to throw her arms around him in a great celebratory hug. Ha Lin was there first. Gwenna, with nowhere to go, nothing to do with her arms, settled for a weak wave. “Thanks,” she shouted. It wasn't clear if he heard her or not, but the damage was already done. She always remembered that smile, the way he'd waved them on even as his own boat foundered.

And now that boy is dead,
Gwenna thought, staring at the grim specter of a man who sat across from her.

It had been a baffling shock to find Valyn at all. The last she'd seen of him had been in Long Fist's camp out on the Blood Steppe. Given what Talal had told her later, and what Kaden had said about Adare, she'd felt certain that one way or another Valyn had died up on that tower in Andt-Kyl. She'd carried the loss around inside her like an ache, and though it had faded over the intervening months, she'd expected that a part of her would mourn her whole life for Valyn and Laith both, good men who had died fighting, trying to do the right thing.